Simon Gaon (born 1943) is an American painter, Expressionist, and action painter. He is best known for his intense, tempestuous, action oriented paintings of the cityscape. He was also a co-founder of the Street Painters, a group of eight New York artists who painted directly from the city life they observed on the streets of America's largest city.
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Born in 1943 in Manhattan, Gaon at an early age displayed creative talents. By age 14 he began painting while attending the Roosevelt School in Stamford, Connecticut. A key influence on him was painter Arthur Bressler (1927-1975) who was Gaon's teacher and mentor. Gaon graduated from the High School of Art and Design in New York City. In 1962, Gaon won the art studio award scholarship from the Art Students League which allowed him to study art on the European continent. In 1964,he studied in Academia 63 in Haarlem, Holland, and furthered his European education with the Art Students League Merit Scholarship(1965) and the Edward G. Mcdowell traveling scholarship
He later stayed more than ten years in Europe, primarily in Paris, where his style evolved. The works of the Fauve painters-Derain, Vlaminck as well as Soutine, Kokoschka, Corith,and especially Van Gogh have all strongly influenced his work.
In his work, Gaon is influenced more by his temperament than intellectualism. He prefers to take risks, and edit later, putting the living experience of painting at the forefront of his craft. As an action painter, he immerses himself physically in his art, using pigment, emotion, and poetry to reinvent nature in a personal way. He paints nature and the city with abandonment and freedom, harnessing the different layers of the subconscious to help form the painting. However, life in all its an energy and contradiction remains his inspiration. Subjects of his art include the night, the stormy sea, and the frenetic, carnival like, neon lit city.
Gaon is most famous for his Time Square series (1998) displaying the chaos and confusion of city. His depictions of the locale have been called dizzying, disorienting, and even mind-boggling. His works manifest the vitality, wildness, drivenness, and hysterical quality of the urban setting, ever expanding to the point of explosion. Gaon's chaotic Time Square, helps him, as an artist, express the contradictory life forces that live within him.
Gaon also focuses on those who live on the urban periphery, the street people, immigrants, and prostitutes. His paintings go beyond the immediate perception of these subjects, to uncover the inherent contradictions both in his subjects psyche and social position, and in his own consciousness. His subjects display a noble and prophetic character, as if spiritually from a bygone era yet awkwardly entrenched in a harsh contemporary reality.
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