Kalju Nagel was born in the Ahja region, attended school in Võnnu and Tartu, and spent the rest of his life in southern Estonia. After the death of his parents, Nagel had to start earning a living at an early age. Before World War II, he enrolled in Pallas Art School, but the war broke out and Nagel went to fight. His studies continued after the war, and later he became an active organizer in the art community.

Nagel was primarily a landscape painter. Although he occasionally traveled to northern Estonia and Saaremaa, most of his work remained focused on southern Estonia. In the late 1960s, for example, he repeatedly visited Haanja and Kristjan Teder’s home region in Arula.

Similar to Konrad Mägi, Nagel created panoramic views of his homeland, depicting the landscape in horizontal bands. The brightness of the foreground gradually darkens in the more distant bands, but not tragically so. Nagel paid particular attention to the composition and rhythm of color patches: instead of a uniform overall color scheme, we see a multitude of smaller color areas.