Phil Simon

I was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, was adopted at 6 weeks old, and came to live in the Bay Area with my adoptive parents, initially on Claremont Avenue in Oakland. We moved to Lafayette in 1947-48 where my youth was spent hiking and exploring the hills, valleys and creeks around Lafayette with all the natural beauty this area had to offer. I had the good fortune to be exposed to many different styles and schools of painting from a very young age, and was encouraged to try painting with several different mediums. This is how I came to discover oils, which I use exclusively because, for me, oils have the magic.

I am primarily self-taught, and if I’m able to discover something in the immediate environment that otherwise would go unnoticed, or remain hidden, and then render this discovery visually accessible such that a viewer might connect with it in a uniquely , personal way, then I consider the painting reasonably successful and I’ve done my job. I begin by putting pigment on canvas, then I have to respond to that brush stroke or swipe with a pallet knife, and again, and then again in continuous moment- to- moment gestalt, creating and reforming imagery in the canvas until, at last, there is nothing else in the work that needs fixing…when the painting is complete; it sometimes takes years.