Logan Maxwell Hagege
One of the most renowned western artists in the U.S. today, Logan Maxwell Hagege’s paintings tell a unique story of the American West and its people. I spoke with him at his studio in Meiners Oaks, just west of Ojai.
Logan Maxwell Hagege at his studio in Meiners Oaks.
“My paintings are rarely things that I have actually seen with my eyes,” says Logan Maxwell Hagege. “They’re things that I have put together in my mind, a very distant memory of something, a time of day, or a combination of colors that I remember from somewhere.”
One of the most prominent western artists in the U.S. today, Ojai-based Hagege’s paintings bring together nature and imagination. Telling a highly stylized, modern tale of the desert lands of the American Southwest, his works uniquely capture the magic and mystery of a culture that has inspired artists for centuries. His vibrant oil paintings of amber cliffs, lofty clouds, brawny horses, and blanketed citizens of Native American tribes have established him as a leading voice in his field, with his works part of the permanent collections of renowned institutions such as the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles; the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City; and Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West in Arizona, to name just a few. His works have sold for anything from $2,400 to $234,000 and range from small paintings to giant canvases as large as murals.
We meet in Hagege’s studio in Meiners Oaks, a huge 2,000 sq ft open warehouse with a 20ft high ceiling that looks a bit like a barn from the outside. This, the artist says, is intentional so that the studio blends in with its rural surroundings. A large, light and airy space, it features a big eight by eight ft window on one side, a wall lined with a bookcase bursting with art books and sculptures on another, along with handcrafted surfboards in a corner (a nod to a former life), unfinished paintings on easels, printed blankets, slotted shelves holding works and canvases, and piled up sketch books on his desk. It’s an artist’s atelier in the truest sense of the word and to Hagege it’s a dream come true. “I had the vision for this type of studio, a big, bright, open space for as long as I can remember,” he enthuses. “But it only became a reality when we moved to Ojai.”
Images above, top left to bottom right: The Man from Bylas; Breathing the Same Air; Running Wild; and Indigo
Hagege grew up in the San Fernando Valley and was obsessed with art from childhood. His first creative endeavor was his pursuit of his passion for comic books and cartoons, when, aged 19, he joined an animation studio in Glendale. Here he was advised to hone his drawing skills at a nearby college, Associates in Art, where he fell in love with life drawing and quickly realized that the collaborative process of animation wasn’t for him. “At art school I loved that I would come up with an idea for a drawing or a painting and it was entirely my vision from start to finish,” he says. He quit his job at the studio and enrolled in the Academy’s Advanced Master’s Program, a two-year, full-time life drawing and painting course, which saw him spend at least six hours, five days a week drawing live models. However, despite immersing himself fully, he still wasn’t sure that art would be his future. “I didn’t actually realize that art could be something you could do full-time until this woman at the art school explained the process of getting into galleries to me,” he recalls. Upon graduating, Hagege got his work into a gallery space in Pasadena and from then, there was no looking back: “I started showing at more and more galleries and it’s been a slow evolution ever since.”
Indeed, an artist’s journey is often said to be an evolution and Hagege admits that his journey to finding his unique style has taken years. “When you go to art school, they teach you a language and you learn how to speak and write that language. But you don’t know how to create poetry,” he explains. “When I first started showing my work at galleries, I had this vocabulary in art that allowed me to paint pretty well, but I didn’t have my own voice.”
He describes his initial style of painting as impressionistic, with short, thick strokes of paint primarily showing scenes of women on the beach. “But then I got to a point where I was suddenly really unhappy with my work and I started to explore different styles of painting,” he says. He began to paint things from his imagination instead of copying photographs and started to move away from a realistic to a more stylized way of depicting his subjects. “It was a strange transition because I’d had enough success early on in my career that to suddenly change my style so drastically felt like an unusual move. I wasn’t sure what people were going to think,” he recalls. “But I knew I had to follow my instinct and actually these new paintings were more popular than my other works and I think that was because my own unique voice was beginning to come out.”
Arizonaland, 2019
It was around this time, too that Hagege embarked on a lifechanging road trip through the Southwest, where he rediscovered the desert in a completely new way. “I’d never considered the desert as a subject before then, but during this trip it suddenly made so much sense,” he explains. “The feeling of being out there, the sense of exploration and traveling through these really quiet and lonely places was so exciting. The simplicity and aesthetic of the desert just clicked with me.”
Hagege began by painting the landscapes of the desert in a stylized yet simplistic way, but his background in life painting quickly inspired him to include the native people of the area he met and built relationships with during his travels in his paintings, too – the people from the Apache and Navajo tribes as well as the Taos Pueblo. His style began to evolve, and his paintings became more complex, developing into his mature stylized realism, which portrays the desert lands and its people in his unique and hauntingly beautiful way.
Describing his work process, Hagege says he always begins with a sketch, and showing me his notebooks, which are filled to the brim with both his doodles and scribbles from his young kids (“I’m not precious,” he laughs), they’re a perfect illustration of how his imagination leads his creative process. “I start with very rough stream of consciousness sketches that may or may not develop into ideas. If I find something that works, a composition that I like, I try to find photographs that resemble that idea,” he says. From there, he roughly puts the photos together in Photoshop and begins to work on the canvas, first outlining the shapes with charcoal and then painting in oil. His compositions reveal a mastery of geometric design and light, a realistic reflection of the colors and shapes that exist in nature, but an imagined coming together of elements that create an almost dreamlike scenario.
During my visit to his studio, a large painting entitled “A Song at Sunset” leans against one of the walls. A huge work sized 96 by 144 inches, it features a collection of people, both on horseback and foot, in a desert scene with distant cliffs, deep green cacti, and billowing clouds. A signature element of his works, the clouds act as a design feature, mimicking the shapes of the blanketed figures in the foreground, and creating a visual roadmap that guides the viewer’s perceptional journey of the canvas.
Hagege reveals that the painting began as an experiment as he wanted to challenge himself to create a work on such a big scale. “In order to grow as an artist I try to push myself into difficult and uncharted territory,” he says. “The idea sprouted from a small doodle in my sketchbook, no larger than two inches wide. From there, I referenced photos, which I used as a jumping off point, for the people and horses. As with most of my work, the actual scene and setting was invented. I rely on memory and imagination to compose my paintings. The people in the painting are all friends that I have made and painted over the years. And although this scene didn't actually occur, with everyone together as a group, it brings me joy to see them all together in the painting.”
A Song at Sunset, 2020
“A Song at Sunset” took over a year to complete and was intended to be part of a solo exhibition in April 2020 at the Maxwell Alexander Gallery in Los Angeles. However, due to Covid-19 the show ended up being a virtual exhibition and so despite the immense effort the artist put into this work, it has only been physically seen by a handful of people. “That being said I am still grateful for the experience of working on such a large piece, and plan on doing more at this scale in the future,” Hagege adds.
Right now, Hagege is preparing for his next big show, the Prix de West exhibition at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, which will be on show until August. The most prestigious western art exhibition in the U.S., which has run for more than five decades, it features works by the most renowned western artists covering everything from historical depictions to impressionistic and contemporary pieces. “It’s a big deal in my world,” Hagege says.
Yet while Hagege feels a huge connection to the West, he shares that he sees the world through different eyes to some of his contemporaries. “I’m not a cowboy and I don’t pretend to be,” he insists. “My paintings are not historical representations or cultural depictions and they’re not paintings of native people, but paintings of people who happen to be native. My paintings are my vision of the world; that’s where it starts and that’s where it ends.”
This profile piece of Logan Maxwell Hagege first appeared as the cover feature of the Summer 2023 issue of the Ojai Magazine. You can access the online edition of the magazine here.
