An exotic and inspirational childhood laid the foundation for Simon Bull’s passionate creative vision.

Simon (on left) with mother

brother & sister. York 1965

The second of four children, Simon’s flair for art was first noticed when he won his first art competition at the age of six. Other childhood art prizes were to follow, including several in his teenage years and a national art students painting prize while he was at college.

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.

That's Cricket - Guyana 1966

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.

At the time of his first one

man show. Hong Kong 1976

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.

Young Love. Simon and Jo,

Macau 1976

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.

Parenthood. With Rebecca 1988

Throughout this period Simon painted the world around him. Travelling 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.

Plein Air painting. Spain 1990

"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."

Old Flames. Simon and Jo, Vail 2000

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 was short listed for the awards, this time in two categories: Best selling published artist overall and best selling original print artist. He won outright the Artist's Print Award for being the best selling artist in the UK of original hand finished prints. The prizewinners were chosen from a detailed poll of the fourteen hundred retail art galleries in the United Kingdom who are members of the Fine Art Trade Guild.

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."