Artworks by Anna Shevel

My passion for art started when I was a small child, growing up in rural Ukraine during the early 1990s. At that time parents had to provide the nursery with teaching materials, and I was lucky that their work as an engineer and a librarian meant mine were able to obtain notebooks, pens and cards for me to draw with. I also spent time at the library with my mother, where I was inspired by book illustrations – especially botanical watercolours. One of my earliest memories is packing two cases for summer holidays at my grandmother’s – one for dolls and one for art materials! Growing up, I would copy my sister’s collection of greeting cards and spend hours designing original artworks to cover my schoolbooks. I vividly remember the first time I painted a tree and found it easy to recreate the accuracy and perspectives of the trunk, branches and leaves. My teachers spotted this early talent and nurtured it by encouraging me to enter my art into local competitions. My grandfather enrolled me into an after-school art club, and it was here that I developed my passion for colours and light, and for painting ‘en plein air,’ where I am inspired by the smells, light and changing views of the natural landscape. My favourite process is painting with contre-jour lighting, with the light source behind the object I am painting. At university I studied teaching and discovered my two favourite techniques: I enjoyed the challenge of hyperrealism for capturing realistic details, colour, and texture; and impressionism for the exaggerated colours and energetic brushstrokes used in my abstract landscape art. I became excited by the differences between graphic art and fine art, which led to a master’s degree in fine art teaching, and I subsequently opened my own studio and art club teaching children and adults. One of my favourite pieces was a small oil painting made ‘in one breath’ using a palette knife, depicting a grey winter landscape illuminated by a pink and orange sunset. I also developed a love of painting with gouache which I find more practical for painting en plein air, where I can build up the layers of light, dark and shade in one session. In 2022, I fled my native Ukraine to the safety of the UK, and now live and work in Hexham, Northumberland, where I have curated my own 6-week exhibition “A Feast for the Eyes”. I am currently exhibiting at the 2025 Northumberland Open Exhibition where my three selected works exemplify my artistic styles and passions: two oil landscapes using contre-jour lighting to highlight the water on the River Tyne and a golden field of hay, just after the balers finished working. The third is a hyper realistic fruit scone, oozing jam and cream – I love the fun this piece causes as exhibition attendees argue about the English ‘cream tea’ etiquette of whether to put the jam on cream or cream on jam!