Simon is a Melbourne based painter with over 30 years experience as a scenic artist for film and television, working in Australia, Japan, Papua New Guinea and New Zealand. Simon was also head of the scenic art workshop for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games Opening and Closing Ceremonies. Some of the productions he’s worked on are listed here

About the work

My background in scenic art influences everything I do in my paintings today, in terms of technique, scale, use of materials and how I approach each work. Recently I’ve been working on 2 series of paintings, an homage to the work of pioneering Manga artist Osamu Tezuka, and a second series exploring disability, in particular sight and braille.

Looking into Tezuka’s work, I discovered a little known 1940s graphic novel “Shin Takarajima”, one of his first which was completed when he was 19. It was in black and white and was quite simplistic in style compared with his later works such as Astro Boy. I was drawn to this early pivotal work and decided to develop a colour palette for it. I also wanted to paint each cell at a large scale (my paintings are approximately 20 times the size of the original cells). In doing this series of paintings I wanted to highlight his early work and the beginnings of the Manga style.

The second series is based on braille, with each painting representing a single word. I became interested in the relationship between art and disability, in this case blindness, and how art can sometimes be unintentionally exclusive. In this series I wanted to bring an awareness to the gift of sight, for the paintings to be a reminder that not all of us have the luxury of sight. I also wanted some of the paintings to be tactile and inclusive for the blind. Braille is typically a raised mound, small in scale. I’ve chosen to enlarge the braille dots in my paintings. Some are simply painted on the canvas, while others are recessed so they can be felt through touching.