My Biography

Hello, I am Shavala Dmytro. When I was a child my father used to take me with him for a walks around the old forests which encircle my hometown, called Shklo, on the west of Ukraine. When I turned 14 I started studying woodcarving in Yaniv, which isn’t that far away from my hometown. This city is famous for being a home for quite a few professional woodcarvers. Studying didn’t come so easily to me, so to my displeasure, I was the worst student in the group. That’s why I promised myself to achieve success and after 3 years of hard work I won an international student competition and earned the title of “Best woodcarver of 2012”. While I was studying in the art college I fell in love with wood and learn how to work with this material. Later I entered the Academy of Arts in Lviv. And here I’m learning more and more about seeing things in an abstract way, analyzing classic works of art, but wood is still by far my favorite material to work with. I love its plasticity, structural diversity and liveliness. Most of the time the wood itself dictates the shape and the context of pieces of art that I’m working on. In art I appreciate refinement, minimalism and moderation of shapes and colors, organization of structures. I am inspired to create my works by old majestic forests.