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This article originally appeared in THE DENVER POST on November 16, 1980 as International Mix Represented in 3 Artists' Intriguing Works. The following an excerpt. It was written by James Mills. It is printed with permission. Photo courtesy of the Lominago family. LOMINAGO, as a painter of religious icons in Leningrad, wasn't looked upon highly by Soviet officialdom. He had been introduced to icon painting somewhat clandestinely by an abbot of Perchersky Monastery, and studied the traditional styles of religious painting and folklore pretty much in seclusion. Lominago left the Soviet Union with his wife and daughter in 1973, with the assistance of the International Rescue Committee. Through clerical contacts, the artist came to Denver in 1974 where he was commissioned to create 36 paintings for the iconostasis at All Saints Russian Orthodox Church, 3274 E. Iliff Ave. In addition to traditional icon painting, Lominago also reaches into the rich sources of Russian folklore and literature for subject matter in his detailed paintings. His colorful panoply of images in the De Colores show ranges from a glowing firebird to a speeding troika in a wintry landscape, onion-topped towers of old churches, women washing clothes in a stream, men plowing and a demure maiden in a Russian steam bath. BUT EVEN in two portraits of young mothers with their children, Lominago maintains a folk style in his composition -- central figures large and frontal, with smaller figures of people and animals in the landscape to suggest the environment. The faces of Lominago's secular figures all bear resemblance to the faces of saints and patriarchs in icons. In "Woodcutter," a boy bundled in a fur-trimmed coat and bearing a hatchet and a bundle of wood literally has the "face of an angel."
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