I was born on 5th of November 1940 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Brda a place at tough Kupres highlands, as youngest of six children of Kata Lozancic, mother, housewife, and father Frane, a planter. Amongst thousands of misfortune children, I as well, lost my both parents at the age of two and by the end of 1942 ended up in a war orphanage in Sarajevo. I have been adopted after that by a family of M. Verencevic and after 9 years got back into orphanage. I graduated high technical school, got employed and while working I graduated and engineering faculty in Sarajevo. In the meantime love happened, marriage, wife Taiba and two children: daughter Sabina and son Zlatko. Almost 40 years of working experience, horrible war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, retirement.

But only formally! By 1990, when I started seriously with painting (oil and aquarelle), with other activities, my second half of life, does not stall in comparison to the first one, which was active in work. Only that the engineer became a painter. Until today I made 235 catalogued works, 27 personal and 15 collective exhibitions in Sarajevo, Kakanj, Travnik, Fojnica, Bugojno, Tesanj, Tuzla, Mostar, Zagreb (Croatia), Hamburg (Germany), Geneva (Switzerland), Seattle (Kirkland USA) and Vancouver (Canada).

I am engaged in photography since my early youth, spontaneously and without any special aspirations. But the photography was good and natural introduction to my painting in my hyperrealism. Beautiful autumn of 2001 at the Green Lake in Seattle was so inspiring that for the first time I made photos with intention to expose them to public judgment. Good public reception and good critique encouraged me to continue with serious engagement in photo art. This is followed by two collective exhibitions (especially important presentation FONDEKA in Republic of Croatia, June July 2005) and five personal exhibitions (Sloga and Mak, Sarajevo, 2004 and 2006, HARRISON STREET GALLERY, Seattle, 2008 at Manifestation "CROATIA FEST 2008", again Mak 2009 and NCC Gallery, Seattle, 2009).

I had a successful exploration of political satire comics - after first attempt my works were presented at collective exhibition of SDP (May 2003 Sarajevo) and on the next year all 9 works that were sent were exhibited at new exhibition.

In the last several years I am seriously into computer graphics which allows me to transform the abundance of art ideas which I carry within. Also allows me to transform the ideas into finished pictures, explore, experiment until a new meeting with my painting kit.

I.F.Raič