David Kassan

David Jon Kassan is an internationally recognized contemporary American painter best known for his life-size representational paintings, which combine figurative subjects with abstract backgrounds or trompe-l'œil stylings. Of this dual representation strategy Kassan notes, “my effort to constantly learn to document reality with a naturalistic, representational painting technique allows for pieces to be inherent contradictions; paintings that are both real and abstract.” Kassan's work 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 development of the EDUT project-"edut" being Hebrew for "living witnesses" as a way of connecting with his grandfather's traumatic history of escaping ethnic cleansing on the border of Romania and Ukraine to come to America in 1917. The EDUT project's mission is to meet with as many living Survivors to the Shoah as possible and to document them in filmed video portraits and in paintings and drawings.