Logan Maxwell Hagege (pronounced Ah-jejj) is an Ojai–based contemporary artist with modern visions of the West. His paintings exhibit all the hallmarks of his classical art training from an academy in Southern California, a modern-day atelier, in which students refined their skills by drawing and painting live models every day for years. Yet it is in the artist’s departure from strict realism where his work now draws its strength and where his vision is fed by a heady mix of nature and imagination.
A power born of observation, recollection, and creative inspiration imbue Hagege’s images of the American Southwest. Hagege’s mature style, which he terms “stylized realism,” has made him a master of design. His signature clouds often mimic the shapes of the blanketed figures in the foreground, creating visual roadmaps for the viewer and further adding to the design and narrative of each composition.
Today, he travels extensively to cultivate inspiration and to deepen his relationship with both his subjects and the culture of the land. He produces field studies on location near a second home in remote northern Arizona where the landscape—in the form of red cliffs, towering clouds, and cerulean skies—is among his guides. Those works inform the pieces he later creates in his studio in Southern California. Hagege’s works are part of the permanent collections of such ranking institutions as the Autry Museum of the American West, Booth Western Art Museum, the Cal Poly Pomona University Collection, the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum and the Scottsdale Museum of the West.
