Growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico allowed Simone the unique opportunity to experience a rich culture and the wonder of an expansive landscape. She always loved nature, mountain biking and catching lizards in the Sandia foothills and camping all over the state. She also received art history and studio art education through high school but always enjoyed it as a passionate hobby. After getting a degree in Environmental Studies at Austin College in Texas, she moved back to New Mexico. Needing artistic fulfillment, she returned to work at Barbara Meikle Fine Art gallery to pursue a creative career doing graphic design, painting photography, and helping people grow their art collections. Her personal talents for painting and drawing were renewed with an introduction to plein air painting. She is now based in Santa Fe and continues to explore northern New Mexico and the West. She hopes to inspire others to environmental appreciation and conservation through her studio and on-site oil paintings and is always on the lookout for the next inspirational vista.
Statement
My work invites the viewer to stop and take a second to enjoy a sense of calm. Nature for me has always been a place of refuge as well as imagination and I constantly seek to capture both in my plein air and studio work in color and form. Through my environmental studies background, I focused on academic ways to explain and quantify nature’s importance and beauty. But I came back to art for those same reasons – art says simply in a lasting image what research tries to codify. Our experience with the natural world is anecdotal, its importance universal. If a viewer sees for the first time the beauty in what they thought mundane, I have done my job as an artist.