[1][2] He discovery of contemporary Mexican art made a great impact and in 1948 at the age of eighteen, he left Canada to move to Mexico.

He enrolled into the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" from 1948 to 1949, studying with Agustín Lazo, Carlos Orozco Romero and Andrés Sánchez Flores.

[2] At La Esmeralda, he focused on this kind of painting, being influenced by the work of José Clemente Orozco, Rico Lebrun and Leonard Baskin.

From this trip, he wrote a script for a radio documentary on the region's music, customs and legends, produced by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

[1] From 1954 to 1956, he studied engraving in metal with Lola Cueto at Mexico City College and lithography from the Escuela de Artes del Libro with Pedro Castelar Baez.

[10] Belkin's career spanned more than three decades, during which time he produced 28 major public murals, various smaller ones, with about ninety individual exhibitions and over fifty collective ones in Mexico and abroad and designed sets and costumes for forty Mexican stage productions, as well as other activities.

In 1952 he painted Canto a la tierra, several fresco panels based on poems by Nezahualcoyotl at the Banco de Monterrey.

From 1978 to 1979 he created La migración sefardí en México at the Centro Social Monte Sinaí in Mexico City.

[6] In 1987 he traveled to Managua, Nicaragua to paint Los prometeos on the Palacio Nacional Héroes y Mártires de la Revolución.

The mural features Emiliano Zapata, Augusto César Sandino and Prometheus, with the two revolutionaries being compared to the mythical Greek figure who brought fire to man.

[13] At the end of the 1980s, he became interested in reinterpreting the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans resulting in murals called Descubrimiento y conquista del Nuevo Mundo (1988–1989) at the Biblioteca Pública de Popotla and 1492 (1991).

[6] In addition to more traditional works, Belkin created what he called "portal murals," large scale paintings which can be moved and adapted as a way to deal with changing architectural tastes such as lower walls and the use of prefabricated panels.

These include a mural to journalist Francisco Zarco at Callejón Francisco Zarco (1977), a mural called La historia del movimiento obrero at Parque Juventino Rosas in the Magdalena Contreras borough and Raíces de las flores Nelhuayotl on the borough hall of Xochimilco all in Mexico City done by students from ENAP.

His first individual exhibition was at the Instituto Cultural Anglo-Mexicano sponsored by the Canadian Embassy in 1952, with the introduction written by David Alfaro Siqueiros.

[1] While many are of contemporary topics, they also included paraphrases of compositions by masters of European art of past centuries such as Nicolas Poussin's The Rape of the Sabines.

[1] From 1981 to 1982 he worked on a series of drawings and paintings called Los amantes based on love poems by Mario Benedetti.

[1][6] From 1985 to 1986 he created the Lucio Cabañas series, which are large scale drawings on amate paper which feature the revolutionary along with Sandino and Pedro Albizu Campos.

From 1955 to 1960 he did set design for Seki Sano, Héctor Mendoza and Luis de Tavira for productions such as Cinco preciosidades francesas and El Décimo hombre.

In 1983 he designed the wardrobe, set and lighting for the work Herejía by Sabina Berman directed by Abraham Oceransky, which received the Premio Nacional de Teatro in the same year.

[1] This led to the formation of the group Nueva Presencia with included Leonel Góngora, Francisco Corzas, José Muñoz Medina, Artemio Sepulveda, Rafael Coronel and Nacho López.

[6] From 1967 to 1968 he created the Museo Latinoamericano with Omar Rayo, Leonel Góngora, Abularach, Paternosto, Gerchman and others because he was unhappy with attitudes towards Latin American shown by the Center for Inter-American Relations.

[1] He also did a few sculptures which include a large scale one in 1981 called El Estudiante for the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa and one in 1986 for the Jardín Escultórico at the Bosque Lázaro Cárdenas in Morelia.

[1] In 1960 he received an award from the Asociación de Críticos Teatrales for best scene design for his work on Terror y miserias del III Reich by Bertolt Brecht.

El hombre si tiene future (homenaje a Bertrand Russell) won the Adquisición del Salón de Pintura prize in 1963.

Also in 1963, he received an honorary mention at the Casa de las Américas for a catalogue of lithographs he made in Los Angeles.

He believed that art should serve as a teaching tool and to spark political discourse, often presenting humanity's most controversial and painful experiences.

[2] He painted historical scenes, never allegory and although his work was influenced by the socialist ideals of his parents, his heroes were those of Latin America, not Canada.

He was influenced by Rico Lebrun who visited Mexico in the 1960s resulting in works which were monochromatic emphasizing the use of grays, sepias, ochres and black.

Two notable works of this type are Resurrección in 1960 and Presagio y Seres terrestres in 1961.In the mid-1960s he experimented with abstract art with all forms being distorted.

In the late 1960s his work featured figures surrounded by circles and ovals,which include El eclipse (1968), Progresión II (1969) and Language-system (1970).