Jan Kagie was self-taught. Important for his development as a painter were the twelve years that he lived and worked in Rolde in Drenthe (1937-1949), where he came into contact with the artists Gerrit Benner, Hendrik Werkman and the members of the Groninger Ploeg. The painter's landscapes from the 1960s are unmistakably related to Benner's work. In his canvases Kagie started from reality, which he distorted and abstracted in his own way. In his geometric-abstract still lifes he set simple objects against a background of abstract coloured areas.