Bio | Cityscapes | Art Gallery | Olena McMurtrey

THE ARTIST

Hi, I am Olena McMurtrey, a contemporary Ukrainian/American artist specializing in cityscapes, seascapes, and landscape. I got inspired to pursue furthering my art education while living in Marina Del Rey, CA and completed the Master of Fine Arts at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco., CA

My paintings live in the space between control and chaos—where city grids dissolve into light, where ocean waves hold both violence and meditation. As a Ukrainian-American artist, I've learned that home isn't a fixed point but something we create through seeing and remaking the world around us. These observations became my visual vocabulary—cityscapes where geometric precision breaks into pure color, seascapes where controlled chaos mirrors our inner storms and calms. My process is a conversation between planning and surrender. With cityscapes, I use oils to build precise architectural bones, then let light destroy and remake those structures. The ocean works demand a different kind of courage. Using layers of tinted resin, I chase that moment when water reveals its dual nature—serene surface, violent depth.

Growing up far from the sea, then discovering surfing in California, taught me that waves are never just water. They're memory, power, fear, joy. My resin paintings don't try to photograph the ocean but to capture how it feels to be small before something infinite. Each layer is a negotiation—I pour, I wait, I respond. The medium teaches me patience while demanding split-second decisions.

Color is my true language. I mix obsessively, searching for that exact vibration between warm and cool that makes a painting breathe. A successful piece happens when color creates its own logic—when that particular orange against that specific blue creates a third reality that exists nowhere else. I think of my palette as emotional temperature—how much heat does this moment need? How much coolness can create tension without freezing the energy?

Lately, I've been thinking about art as conversation rather than statement. Living in San Francisco and Marina Del Rey, walking between city and beach daily, I see how environments shape us and how we shape them in return. My work is evolving from capturing places to questioning our relationship with them. How does a Ukrainian immigrant see California light differently? What happens when we paint not just what we see but how seeing changes us?

I believe painting still matters because it slows time in a world moving too fast. Each piece is an invitation to pause, to notice how light transforms everything it touches, to remember that beauty and danger often share the same space. My paintings ask viewers to find themselves in that tension—between order and chaos, between holding on and letting go.

My heart is broken by the war happening in Ukraine, and one day my art will reflect this. Right now, I'm trying to take it day by day and keep bringing beauty into the world through my art.