He was born on June 8, 1986, in Lutsk, in a family of artists. He has a younger brother, Maxim, and a sister, Anna. Since childhood, he read books about Indians, and still shares their respectful attitude to nature.
At school, he was nicknamed "Shyman".
Victor's father was a musician by education, accordion class, he liked to play songs from cartoons to his children. At first, he taught music in high school and even then drew for himself. Over time, he worked as a decorative artist in the Lutsk workshop of the Volyn Regional Art and Decorative Combine.
As a child, Denys and his brother often visited their father's workshop. This is how he describes the atmosphere: "Ink, gouache, oil paints, oracle, tablets - these are the smells with which the workshops of the combine were permeated. Kilometers of campaign posters were written there, museums, exhibitions, and school expositions were designed."
Alla's mother graduated from the Kyiv Technical Institute of Light Industry, specializing in leather and fur, and worked as a technologist at a shoe factory.
In the summer, he visited his relatives in the village of Rozhichi. There, Volodya's grandfather, who loved carpentry, had a garage where perfect order prevailed - every tool had a designated place. This impressed the children's imagination so much that already in adulthood, such a pedantic order prevails in Szymanskyi's own sculptural workshop.
In 1998, together with his brother Maksym, he entered an art school in Lutsk: "Being an artist was love! We had a teacher Kaspruk Lesya Pavlivna - an artist, wrote poetry, was engaged in theater decoration. Our class was like one big creative family. We constantly experimented with materials, put together still lifes, studied various techniques. Great attention was paid to watercolors and various types of graphics."
A creative atmosphere prevailed not only at school, but also at home. Over time, my father involved Maxim and Denis in the design, my mother bought a series of the weekly "Great Artists" - the boys read it. The choice of further education was obvious - in 2002, together with his brother, he entered the Lviv Art College named after Ivan Trush. I got into ceramics by accident, which I have never regretted.
From the words of Denys Szymanskyi:
"And that's how I got to Levkiv and Dragan, who, although he didn't teach me composition, but their workshops were located next to each other, and everyone constantly communicated. Dragan taught modular service, which everyone was looking forward to. Because it's really fantastic: to develop, draw out all the details of the service that should be assembled into a single block, for example, a cube, and also calculate the shrinkage of each part. Ceramics are very interesting in their technicality, and Levkiv was quietly sculpting his works near us in the workshop all the time... They stood everywhere so unobtrusively... That is, you walk and have the opportunity to get something. I think the fact that the teacher works next to the students is cool! It organizes, motivates even more, you live even more."
In 2006–2013, he studied at the Department of Sculpture at the National Academy of Sciences, in the first year he took a course with Ivan Samotos, and continued his studies in the studio of Yaroslav Skakun. The diploma project was a private order of a memorial sculpture at the Lychakiv cemetery - the tombstone of the Lviv fencer Olga Bno-Ayriyan. I made her figure based on an old photo for a German sports magazine, where she poses beautifully when she was still young. The customer, the fencer's husband, wanted his wife to be remembered just like that. The sculptor took a risk by choosing marble instead of bronze. For the first time, I worked with this material in a volume of two cubic meters.
