DOVER PLAINS — Oresta O. Szeparowycz was born Nov. 17, 1938, in Lviv, Ukraine, and died on Aug. 26, 2026, in Dover Plains, New York, after a long, remarkable life. A talented artist, she passed away in her sleep, from cancer, just days before the opening of her inaugural sculpture exhibit in Millerton. She was 87.
The daughter of the late Daria and Omelian Szeparowycz, her birth name was Orysia but she changed it to Oresta in the early 1950s, soon after arriving in New York City from a displaced persons camp in Germany. Both names stem from the ancient Greek for “of the mountains.”
She graduated from Washington Irving High School in Manhattan and was awarded a full scholarship to the Pratt Institute. Although initially studying architecture, she fell in love with painting and ultimately earned a degree in fine arts. She was also invited to attend the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, in Maine.
In 1963, during the height of the Cold War, the USIA (United States Information Agency) hired her as a guide and interpreter for the first American graphic arts exhibition and tour of the Soviet Union. Highlights were the standing-room-only lectures given in Moscow by Norman Rockwell, which Oresta, fluent in Russian, translated. By the early 1970s, married to an aspiring actor and living in Brooklyn, she was teaching art at the Chapin School and employed part-time by the city’s department of cultural affairs.
Involved in the community activism of the day, Oresta helped establish an early, pioneering arts center in Park Slope. However, neither marriage nor regular employment agreed with her, and she escaped to the Greek islands, settling in a rustic shepherd’s hut on Crete, where she spent two years creating stone sculptures inspired by its mountains and extraordinary light.
In 1986, her first solo painting exhibition was held at the Ukrainian Institute of America on East 79th Street, and filled with vibrant works that reflected the lush, Rousseau-like beauty of her subsequent travels to the Dominican Republic, the Bahamas, and Southeast Asia.
Her successful freelance career encompassed window displays for Bergdorf Goodman and numerous paintings for private celebrity clients, including actor Yvette Mimieux and television reporter Gabe Pressman. She was represented by two major galleries in Beverly Hills at that point, leading to design commissions from the House of Saud and portraits for the Thai royal family. Returning to New York in the 1990s, she and a partner purchased property on the Ten Mile River where, working outdoors, Oresta contracted a rare combination of tick-borne illnesses that inspired a 60-page art-book collage aptly titled “Ticked Off.”
By then living in Dover Plains, Oresta continued creating the kind of mystical stone sculptures, or petras, she’d first been inspired to make in Crete, only now with shale gathered from Dutchess County hilltops.
“I used my art as a healing force and source of empowerment,” she once wrote in an artist’s statement. “Art was and is my lifeboat. It takes me to unimaginable destinations where I can search for the light within myself and in my work.”
She is survived by her nephew, Mark Sheparovich of Redwood City, California, and by many beloved friends. Her memorial service will take place at 11 a.m. this Saturday, Oct. 10, at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, 40 Leedsville Road, Amenia Union, N.Y.
Instead of flowers, donations are welcome at both the Food of Life food pantry https://www.stthomasamenia.com/ways-to-give
and Episcopal Relief and Development - Ukraine Crisis https://www.episcopalrelief.org/press-releases/supporting-humanitarian-response-to-the-crisis-in-ukraine/
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino 
