John Kasyn
"His affection for the bricks-and-mortar of [Toronto] radiates from his work; he has elected himself to get the details of every stoop, every window, every dripping icicle right. Houses, like people, put their best face forward but Kasyn is more curious about the rear view. People don't live at the front of their houses. The back lanes are more interesting than the front. That's where the clotheslines are, the lean-tos, the garbage cans and broken fences."
Toronto Star, 2000
John Kasyn was raised in Winnipeg and moved to Toronto in 1940. He attended Central Technical School and the Ontario College of Art, and worked at Design Studios for eight years as an art director, before devoting himself full time to his painting.
Kasyn was a member of the Ontario Society of Artists (O.S.A.) and the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour (C.S.P.W.C.) and was a regular exhibitor with both groups, having won the Gold Medal at a showing in London, Ontario.
Kasyn's work is shown in galleries across Canada, and his paintings are in many important collections in both Canada and the United States, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as well as the travelling collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Kasyn's oils and watercolours of old houses in the inner core of Toronto, depicting buildings that are fast disappearing from the scene, and his meticulous and nostalgic paintings of abandoned barns and gently rolling fields have won him many admirers across Canada, as well as in the United States.
John Kasyn was represented by the Mazelow Gallery, Toronto; Wallack Galleries, Ottawa; De Vooght Galleries, Vancouver and Galerie Walter Klinkhoff, Montreal.
