Mher Shahinyan

Mher Shahinyan was born in the city of Yerevan in 1965. He grew up in a worker's family and had an ordinary childhood, like so many other children of the Soviet era. Shahinyan's interest in art awoke at a fairly mature age. One day he simply felt the urge to pick up a brush and create something.

But since Mher had no formal artistic education, the future self-taught painter set out to learn the fundamentals of the visual arts on his own. This happened after he had moved to Russia, to the city of Sochi. The nature of his work allowed Mher to devote a great deal of time to the pursuit that had captivated him completely. He would spend long hours in Sochi's State Library, studying countless books on painting. Everything interested him: styles, movements, the biographies of famous artists, the particularities of various painting techniques.