NAME: Hillel Kagan
BIRTH PLACE: Canada
BIRTH DATE: 10.13.47
BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1947 in Toronto, Hillel Kagan has been a professional artist since graduation from Central Technical School Art Institute in 1967. He began showing works in 1975 and has been a full time painter since 1985. He has had shows, both solo and group in private and public galleries. Hillel is currently self represented and if you're interested in more information please feel free to contact him directly
(Artist"s Statement)
I'm a believer in the struggle to achieve the purely innocent eye. A "Cezannist". That is an impressionist constantly trying to measure his/her "impression" without prejudice and with accuracy. That is Cezanne's lesson and revelation.
I love Velazquez for his modernity. Vermeer for his sense of space and teaching us how and how not to use the camera. Cezanne of course, as the ultimate plodder of modern art who steadily climbed the mountain. Giacometti, innately more gifted who took up the challenge. And all the other heroes: Picasso when he and Braque were one person. Gris as the best of the lot. Lipschitz, the sculptor and Soutine for bending space. Bomberg and his followers. Bacon, the master trickster. Hopper, de Kooning and Diebenkorn and all my fellow loser artists on this site and elsewhere for dreaming and persisting and never giving up in the face of ridicule, envy and outright contempt.
About The Subway Paintings
I have lived and worked in Toronto all my life. I am a painter of figurative works, particularly the human figure within enclosed spaces. That's what the city is to me, a series of enclosed spaces linked together by sidewalks, roads, underground malls, buses and subways. There are a few spaces where we give ourselves a reprieve from all this confinement. Some parks and ravines to give ourselves the illusion of being outdoors in nature. As an urban person this lack of so called nature is quite natural for me. To paraphrase Jackson Pollock "We are nature".
I'm a "paint what I see" kind of artist. A believer in the struggle to achieve the purely innocent eye while honing the faculties of measurement of the creative physicist. That is, the inner clock as opposed to the exterior clocks and devices of grids and plumb lines and computers. In this manner the potential to discover fresh form is infinite. Art can't change the world but it can change an individual's perceptive abilities thereby increasing their interest and enhancing their lives
The paintings I'm displaying here are from a series of works produced from 1996-2005. They were generally exhibited as "The Subway Paintings". The motif has no special meaning or social significance for me other than the fact that while riding the subway one day,it occurred to me that I was in this long rectangularly shaped cubic room that was hurtling through space and time. The train was moving and the people in it were moving. The human figure, deep space and movement. These are all the things that are of interest to me. Anonymous people busily moving about their enclosed urban environment.
The Struggling Figures Series
For a six year period from about 1988-1994 I worked on and off on a series of paintings of struggling figures, These paintings arose from our move to my childhood home. Upon becoming a widower for the second time my father moved to smaller quarters and invited us to live in his house.
At about the same time, while rummaging through his (my father's) vast collection of junk, i happened upon some photo illustrations of wrestling and jujitsu holds from the 1930s that he had used to study from during his amateur wrestling career. These images and the new space I found myself in combined to formulate this series of paintings.Although a continuation of my ongoing study of the human figure in enclosed space, these paintings were more personal in nature as they embodied both the struggle of of family life within the home, a struggle not violent but more a dance or enactment with all the participants knowing their roles, and the struggle of modern figurative painting, i.e. the resolution of conflict between abstraction and realism, flatnesss and illusion.
The Great European Torah Scholar I, II, III, IV
Jewish tradition as we know it today was formed in Europe. In point of fact without the influence of Europe the Judaism that is practiced would be unknown. This melding of an ancient eastern religious cult with the west, despite the inherent conflicting ideologies and more importantly and more likely because of those conflicts has given birth to a great and vital tradition of tolerance and compassion. A culture of interpretation and differing ideas yet in the main tolerant to difference and contributory to the bettering of the world. For over a thousand years Rabbis, scholars and thinkers from Maimonides and Spinoza to Buber and Kafka and countless others, have benefited European culture even while under duress from their neighbours. It's in the spirit of that contribution that I've created this series of paintings.
