Early Life and Education
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, the Netherlands, 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, Corinth, and especially Van Gogh have all strongly influenced his work.
Read more about this topic: Simon Gaon
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Pray be always in motion. Early in the morning go and see things; and the rest of the day go and see people. If you stay but a week at a place, and that an insignificant one, see, however, all that is to be seen there; know as many people, and get into as many houses as ever you can.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“One can think of life after the fish is in the canoe.”
—Hawaiian saying no. 23, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)