Art… Artist
These are two challenging words to define personally. Art is personal and evokes different emotions in people differently. And as an artist, I use my creations as a tool to show and express my life experiences.
Stephan Hagens lived in France before moving to Canada at 12. From a very young age, Stephan was surrounded by art and music. Influences from his artist Mother and engineer Father ignited his creative spark and curiosity to understand how things are fabricated. Both art and design heavily influenced how he grew up and understood his surroundings.
“ I have always been creative, for as long as I can remember, and my hands were the tools I used as a child while I doodled, designed, and built things.”
– Stephan Hagens
He graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design, where he majored in interior design and followed by entering the corporate world, where designing spaces fed his creativity. This eventually led to him designing and building sculptural furniture that incorporated beauty and function. His innate desire to create never wavered. Over the years, he gained a wealth of knowledge on photography and sculpture through experience, self-study, and learning from other professional artists. His creativity is powerfully drawn to human experience, psychology, and emotions, and he is fascinated by nature and animal life. His photographs primarily focus on nature and animal portraiture in their natural environment. While his sculptures primarily focus on the emotion and feelings of his subjects.
“Whether through painting, sculpture, metalwork, woodworking, or photography, my work is influenced by the psychology of human behaviour and the incorruptible essence of the natural world.”
– Stephan Hagens