David Kassan

David Jon Kassan (born February 25, 1977 in Little Rock, Arkansas) is an internationally attributed contemporary American painter best known for his life-size representational paintings, which put in figurative subjects in the same way as abstract backgrounds or trompe-l'œil stylings. Of this dual representation strategy Kassan notes, “my effort to for all time learn to document truth with a naturalistic, representational painting technique allows for pieces to be inherent contradictions; paintings that are both real and abstract.” Kassan's undertaking is best classified as Social Documentary Painting, due to the importance and relevance of the subjects he chooses to represent.

In 2014, Kassan turned his attention to painting and documenting Survivors of the Holocaust, with the progress of the EDUT project )-"edut" being Hebrew for "living witnesses" as a mannerism of connecting next his grandfather's traumatic records of escaping ethnic cleansing upon the link up of Romania and Ukraine to enter upon America in 1917. The EDUT project's mission is to meet subsequently as many flourishing Survivors to the Shoah as attainable and to document them in filmed video portraits and in paintings and drawings.

While many survivors have already told their stories on video (as in the Visual History Archive developed by the USC Shoah Foundation) or in memoirs, Kassan believes painting offers listeners a different kind of attachment to the survivors, one that puts a personal twist to the sometimes abstract idea of the Holocaust.

In 2017, David Kassan partnered subsequent to the USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Fisher Museum of Art to manufacture the EDUT project into a Resilience Exhibition which will entry at the Fisher Museum in the slip of 2019 in Los Angeles.

Kassan is a much sought after drawing and painting educational because of his long-lasting commitment to the age old-fashioned discipline of working from computer graphics and creating compelling expressions of the human condition. He has answer painting/drawing seminars and lectures at various institutions, and universities approaching the world.
In 2013, he founded the Kassan Foundation in hopes of giving grants directly to underprivileged capability in both the visual and musical arts.

Kassan works can be seen in many public collections worldwide. Kassan currently lives in Albuquerque. NM.