Alexey Steele, born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1967, began his art training at an early age in the studio of his father, Leonid Steele, the renowned painter of Russian Academic Tradition of the Socialist Realism School. He furthered his professional education at the prestigious Surikov Art Institute of the Soviet Academy of Arts in Moscow under important, internationally acclaimed artist Illia Glazunov. Steele moved to Los Angeles in 1990.

Steele is known for his large-scale figurative works in oil and on paper, psychological portrayals of common men of society, plein air landscapes and for employment of art as a tool of social action in the form of public art and art outreach.

Steele’s approach to figure is rooted in the Renaissance and Baroque periods seen through the prism of Russian Academic Tradition. At the same time, his works possess a modern feel and intensity in their peculiar audacity of grand scale, grand themes and content driven formal expression.
Solving various problems in the development of his mammoth works, Steele employs largely forgotten Renaissance period processes. He is known for creating full size drawings, referred to as “cartoons,” which attract attention in their own right. His portraiture conveys empathy and expresses humanistic ideals by giving noble presence of royal portraits to a modern day common men and women from the rock bottom of society. Steele executes his life-sized portraits in a series of live sessions often publicly as a form of community outreach. In his landscapes and seascapes Steele examines formal qualities of movement and distance while in his figure works he is preoccupied with dimensional underpinning of shapes. The Russian Academic inspired approach to unity of dimension, tonality and color plays important role in Steele’s visual language.

Two of his unique and major mural commissions of large-scale original multi-figure compositions include The Circle, a 372-inch diameter, and the 272-inch diameter allegorical work, The Soul of the Hero.
Alexey Steele was commissioned by the City of Oxnard a master drawing “Quiet Steps of Approaching Thunder” for the permanent collection of the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, California.