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More about Simon Bull
The second of four children, Simon’s
flair for art soon began to be noticed, when he won his first art competition at the age
of six. Other childhood art prizes were to follow, but by then, his developing business
sense had led him towards a different category of prize as the value of his art sales to
school teachers began to grow significantly.At the age of seven he was sent to boarding
school in the North of England with his elder brother. The next four years provided a
heady cocktail of experiences for an impressionable young mind. The windswept loneliness
of the red brick Victorian school, along with the tough regime of a religious educational
institution where little time was allowed for recreation, contrasted with times of
adventure at home in South America. Home was a rambling white colonial house on brick
pillars, with floors of polished wood. A colony of fruit bats lived in the loft and
emerged at six every evening, humming birds fed from flowering trees in the garden, which
was also home to the family’s parrots and a menagerie of different pets including a
kinkajou and coatimundi.
The fringes of the rainforest provided
the young artist with a wonderland of sight and sound. It was a world of color and
mystery, the cathedral like pillars of the forest trees and the swollen rivers adding a
note of darkness and danger to the enchanted wilderness.
During his teens the family moved to Hong
Kong for several years. It was here that he first encountered the art of the East where
the beauty of Chinese brushwork with its economy of line and energy of composition was to
have such a lasting influence on him. It was here also that he held his first one-man
exhibition at the age of eighteen. The success of that and other subsequent shows was to
lead Simon into a lifetime career in art.
While living in the East he continued his
education in England at a boarding school in South London that he describes as "A
much more pleasant and benign establishment." More significant though is the
opportunity that being in London afforded him as he was able to familiarize himself with
the great art collections and attend a wide range of exhibitions as they came to town.
Many influences were coming together and
shaping an inner vision of the world that was to inform Simon’s passion to create,
not just an image, but an experience. Something to heal and enrich, something that would
make a difference.In the early years at boarding school, the sense of desolation he felt
whilst away from the bosom of the family opened him up to an intense search for spiritual
nourishment. Coming from a religious background had meant that a sense of God was always
present with him, but as he grew older, a desire for a more tangible spiritual reality led
him to the Bible and eventually to find in the person of Jesus, one who brought him the
peace he so badly needed as well as a new purpose and sense of destiny.
While still at art school he married
Joanna, his childhood sweetheart. As time passed the economic challenges that faced the
growing family were many, but always there would be some buyer who saved the day, some
last minute commission that turned up. During the late seventies and early eighties the
skills in printmaking that he acquired at art school and which had especially fascinated
him began to pay dividends. He sold his first three editions to Pallas Gallery in London
and then entered a relationship with London Contemporary Art who sold out many of his
meticulously worked multi plate etching editions. |
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Throughout this period Simon painted the world around him. Traveling extensively to the
East, he trekked with his paints through the foothills of the Himalayas, toured the
Mediterranean and spent many weeks painting the mountains of the English Lake District
where he and Joanna now live with their four children. However as each year passed a
deeper creative current seemed to pull at the artist. Once again it seemed that what had
happened during his teens in the spiritual realm was now touching him in the creative
realm; a sense of something more, of something waiting to be touched and expressed beyond
the world of visible realities. He was moving away from painting the outward things, his
canvases began to be expressions of the inner world, the world of the heart and of the
spirit where the real life of mankind is felt and lived.
Like a butterfly emerging from it’s
chrysalis the rich and vibrant style for which he has since become world famous began to
find expression, to find a voice. It was not until his major one-man show at Harrods in
London where seventy-six of his paintings were exhibited together, that the effect of this
new work came home to him.
"I remember walking around the
show listening to what people were saying. I began for the first time to understand what
my paintings had become. The people were telling me! People were being transported, the
colors and imagery were becoming a means of conveying the viewer into another world, the
miracle was happening. People were being hit right in their emotional center."
In 1997 he was rewarded with the accolade
of the UK best-selling artist award shortlist, despite competing with a hand made editions
program against mass produced editions. Again in the year 2000 he has been short listed
again, this time in two categories: Best selling published artist overall and best selling
original print artist. In 1998 a management company, Simon Bull International Ltd., was
formed to handle the marketing of the painter’s prolific output and in 1999 a
separate corporation, Simon Bull International Inc., was established in the US to
represent his increasingly important US program.
His art has come a long way since he held
aloft his prize at the local cinemas’ Saturday Matinee coloring competition in 1964.
But that same passion to play with color, to create with radiant hues, harmonies that
affect the senses, remains with him still.
"If I can touch a life. If
through my painting I can show something previously unseen. If I can reveal something old
in a new way, if I can enrich a soul on it’s journey into the eternal, then my
painting, my living, has not been in vain."
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