We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Simone Scholes. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Simone below.

Simone, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I began my career at Art College but was very quickly pulled onto a different track of the corporate world of fashion. Over the years I always painted occasionally in my free time painting family and friends in watercolor and pastel, even winning an award at a local art association gallery show for a portrait of my son, but I lacked the vision of how I could incorporate this into a full time career.
In a serendipitous turn, my corporate career brought me on a journey to Vietnam many years later, where I fell in love with a painting hanging in a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh city. Unable to forget this painting, I picked up my paintbrush on my return home and painted my first portrait in oil haven’t stopped painting since. It was over 25 years since I was at art school and I had little experience in using oils I spent time researching other artists and doing on-line classes to help me explore techniques and processes to help me build and refine my style.
My art really moved on over the next few years as I built connections, collectors and explored different avenues for selling and at times I look back and wonder where my path would have led me if I’d focused on Art at the beginning of my career. The answer is that it wasn’t my time, I hadn’t explored the world yet, I didn’t have the experiences that would direct my creative vision. My work incorporates so much from my corporate career with textiles and fashion and that would be missing if I’d started sooner.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Fashion was my first love, I recall as a young child making shoe’s, hats and accessories from craft supplies and spending countless hours on my fashion wheel creating outfits and patterns so it’s not a surprise that this was my first career choice. I recall my first art lesson focused on drawing the face in high school which really captivated me, the thought that our faces are all made of the same fundamental shapes but everybody looks so different. My love for drawing and painting evolved from here.
My love of fashion and of people has brought me to where I am today. I’m drawn to understand who really is that person against how they like to express themselves and be seen to the world through clothing and accessories. A portrait should have universal meaning, you shouldn’t need to know who the person is to be captivated by it. It should strike a familiar chord, an aspect of the human condition that we all recognize. I play with familiar shapes and light to create different personas. Using a combination of materials and textures, my fashion and textile inspired artwork aims to capture both the outward beauty and the inner mysteries of human beings.
I’m drawn to impressionist art where simplistic shapes become detailed paintings from afar. Once I started painting in oils, around 5 years ago, I spent time studying the work of Artists whose work I’m drawn to:
Phuong Quoc Tri, a Vietnamese artist I discovered in a small restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City.
Ryan Hewett, a South African artist whose earlier abstract portraits of key world leaders amaze me. His placement of color appears chaotic with lot’s of energy but always easily recognizable of the subject.
Michael Carson, an American artist whose figurative work experiments with unusual light source and incorporates elements of 2D into his work creating moody and edgy fashion paintings.
Once I was painting in oils I found that I was getting into too much detail, the work I was drawn to being very loose and abstract but I didn’t know when to stop and although I was producing some great pieces, but they were too detailed for what I was trying to achieve. I found some great resources for on-line courses which really helped me evolve my work, color palette and technique more aligned with my vision. The work and process that goes into my now looser work is still very detailed and planned but I think this is feeding the technical portion of my brain to help me create the illusion of a more simplistic piece of art.
Kara Bullock Art has a multitude of on-line courses and packages that I found very reasonable in price, becoming part of the artist community whilst doing some of the courses also gave me the opportunity to be a guest artist of their Let’s Face It program in 2023.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Really understanding how important artist support groups and art magazines are. Most of my growth and direction has come from local artist group memberships. Meeting other artists and learning about their journeys. Finding valuable resources and the opportunities for shows (80% of the work I sell is through shows).

I am a member of multiple local art associations, magazines and on-line groups. I invest time to connect in these groups and participate in the events they offer and call for arts. Juniper Rag and Attleboro Art Museum have both played a huge part in my growth over the last year.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Being an artist can be an emotional roller coaster. When I spend the day painting my emotions can be like a pendulum – “This painting is great, it’s going exactly as planned” to “This painting is horrible, nothing is working”. For me the most rewarding is getting to that finish line whichever route it has taken me, a piece that is finished aligned with my original vision or a piece that has taken me some time to figure out. I’ve sold paintings I wasn’t considering selling because they were not what I was trying to achieve and although it’s great that someone saw something that connected with them, I don’t have the same reward in these pieces as for me it doesn’t resonate as finished

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.simonescholesart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonescholesart
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/simonescholesart

Image Credits
Image titled Image from L’usine is the painting by Phong Quoc Tri that I saw in Ho Chi Minh City which triggered my oil painting journey mentioned in the interview questions.