1924 - 2011 Lomakin was born in Krasny Kholm, in Tver Region of Russia on August 26, 1924. At the age of 16, he studied at the High School of Arts in Leningrad and continued his stay until the school was evacuated to Samarkand in February 1942. He enlisted in the Great Patriotic War in 1942, was seriously injured the following year, and received the First Class Patriotic War Order and Medal For Bravery. In 1944, he returned to the High School of Arts, which had relocated back to Leningrad. Oleg graduated from the the I. E. Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in the B.V. Ioganson workshop in 1952. Among his teachers were Scholokhov, Bernstein, Anisovich, Mikhailov and Zaitsev. “The best memories I have are associated with Zaitsev, both as a man and as a teacher.” In 1952, he also joined the Leningrad Chapter of the Russian Artists Union. In 1978, Lomakin won a Kirov Factory Prize and in 1981 he was named Honorable Artist of Russia. He participated in national, republican and local exhibits in Leningrad, and international exhibits in Finland, Germany, France, Spain and Japan. Authored by N.G.. Moiseyeva, Lomakin’s album-monograph was published in Leningrad in 1991. Lomakin comments, “I am a realist. I like to paint interesting people. I like to paint landscapes, too. I have painted many subjects, but I like working on portraits the most. It seems to me that the graphic art should be diversified. Everybody sees in his own, different way. And this diversity, this ‘dispute’, can result in interesting productions. However, I think that the sense of life, the presence of live nature, is indispensable in painting; for nothing is more beautiful than nature.” Lomakin is listed in Bown’s, A Dictionary of Twentieth Century Russian and Soviet Painters.