Professor Alain Gavin moved from Paris, France, to New York City at the age of eleven and at thirteen began studying art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Gavin has been teaching at Chicago State University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since the early seventies a variety of studio classes including Oil painting, watercolor, printmaking, and drawing. His own work in oils and watercolors, have been exhibited in numerous museums and private galleries including the Nancy Hoffman Gallery, in New York, the Frumkin Gallery, in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rahr-West Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum and the Jewish museum, New York. His paintings are in the corporate collections of the Kemper Insurance Group, the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Chemical Bank.

Alain Gavin regularly sketches the sunrise over Lake Michigan. He is always awed by the experience of watching the earth rush toward a red sunrise. Galileo and Stephen Hawking, Leonardo and computer matrix, family and religion are lenses through which this scene is understood. The waves breaking at sunrise, become metaphors, the work a transcription of these impressions.