Jo Bezaan was born in Uitgeest. His father owned a printing business. After his elementary school days, he went to work in his father's printing business. The company then moved to Alkmaar and the family moved with it.
In the evenings, Bezaan took lessons with an artist K.F.G. Hentschel, who came from Germany. Life as a painter attracted Jo Bezaan more than working as a printer, so he rented a studio in the artists' village of Bergen, in North Holland. In the village, he came into contact with artists such as J. Rädecker and Matthieu Wiegman. Bezaan developed more and more.

Bezaan spent short periods of time in Oisterwijk, Haarlem and Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, he married Martina Geertruida Hendrika Broekema in 1919 and a year later they had a son Jaap Rijn.

To make a living, he produced drawings and pastels. He produced beautiful heads of Putten farmers and Spakenburg fishermen, as well as oil paintings of the countryside around Putten and Garderen. Yet he also had time to make trips to Morocco and even the peninsula The Crimea in Russia.

In addition to his work as an artist, he also found time to be busy as an archaeologist in the outskirts of Putten and Ermelo. The many burial mounds had his great interest and he was involved in the large excavations in 1925 in Krachtighuizen. These excavations were done under the supervision of the well-known archaeologist Prof. Dr. J.H. Holwerda.

The events of World War II had a great impact on Bezaans' life. He himself was declared a communist by the fanatical NSB leader Piet Goedvree, who held meetings in his house with resistance fighters. During the April - May strike of 1943, Jo Bezaan was arrested on May 2 of that year with nine other Putten people and deported to Camp Vught. They were held as hostages, with the constant threat of being executed if there was an attack by the resistance on the German occupiers. After more than a month, the Putten hostages were released on June 12, 1943.

Even more drastic was the raid of October 1 and 2, 1944, following a failed attack by the resistance on a car carrying four German soldiers of the Wehrmacht. One of the resistance men involved was his friend Piet Oosterbroek. A total of 559 men were deported and that included his only son Jaap. Jaap Bezaan studied at the Technical High School in Delft, but because there were no more lectures during occupation time in 1944, he was at home with his father and mother. His fiancée Gerda Ackermann was also staying at the Postweg at the time, a stepdaughter of his friend Henk Henriët. His son Jaap was deported to KZ Neuengamme, but he died on Feb. 11, 1945, in Meppen-Versen, an outside camp of KZ Neuengamme.

Bezaan was heartbroken after hearing this sad news about his son. This event of the raid, with 552 victims, including his son, nevertheless inspired him to create the lithographs about the raid. Ten poignant black and white images of the events of October 1 and 2, 1944.

After the war, Jo Bezaan was a member of the Federation of Visual Artists and chairman of the Amersfoort Artists' Society. Together with his wife Tine, he made another trip to southern France in 1951, where he studied prehistoric cave drawings. After his return from southern France, a serious illness revealed itself, from which he died on September 17, 1952.