About Ivan Saramaha

Ivan Saramaha is not only master of an art medium seldom seen today, but through this work, offers a unique viewpoint in illusion and symbolic fantasy. Gazing into the intricacies of these paintings, the viewer is drawn into a fantastic world of optical imagery. Saramaha's elaborately detailed graphics reflect his own unique order of nature in its simplicity, but leads the imagination into ever increasing complexities exposing the very soul of the universe. Saramaha's paintings can definitely be described as "a unique graphic experience."
	Saramaha is one of five children, the son of Ukrainian parents forced to flee their war-torn homeland in the 1940s to finally settle in France. As a child, Ivan loved art and spent many hours in the Louvre daydreaming about becoming an artist himself. He watched the street painters and student artists of Paris, picking up ideas and techniques, always interested in creating his own style, but wanting to know everything about art and the artists he saw everywhere around him.
Ivan later went to Italy to study for the priesthood, but finding it not to his liking, he returned to Paris and joined the French Navy. After his military obligation, Saramaha supported himself and his artistic pursuits by working in some of France's finer hotels and restaurants. In 1975 he joined his family in the United States, once again working in restaurant and hotel positions. The gift of a set of pens from a co-worker finally led Ivan Saramaha to experiment with the style that has become uniquely his own. Using simple tools, old-fashioned dip pens and custom mixed colors, Saramaha creates his geometric designs and optical images of precision and simple, yet complex beauty. These paintings are an experience in imaginative symbolism that Saramaha successfully presents to his audience. Each painting is carefully planned and executed and clearly shows Saramaha's love of the medium in which he works.	UNITED SATTELITES
THE SPACE TOWER	Ivan Saramaha presently resides in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with his wife and two children. His studio is in his home, and he has begun to devote more of his time to his art, increasing substantially the number of paintings he has available to show. Saramaha has shown his work in several major exhibitions around the country and has had several private and one-man shows. This collection contains older paintings exposing the artist's struggle to portray his unique concepts of reality. The newer ones, however, reveal an artist more familiar with his universe, more controlled, and more able to define that creative link between the artist and his subject. This collection hopes to share that unique Saramaha graphic experience.