Simone designed fashion and home furnishings for high street multiples. It was only when she encountered David Cranswick, a ’Renaissance’ painter, that she left the commercial world and spent three years training in his studio. The process began by copying old masters with preliminary drawings in burnt sienna pigment and tones built up in verdacchio. Stronger colours were then glazed into the work to create a powerful translucent appearance. These paintings often took six months to complete.
Simone developed this technique and painted portrait commissions (animals and humans) alongside finding her own means of self-expression.
Her work consists of several phases including: The early, darker, more academic phase influenced by Renaissance training. The paintings inspired by letters and poems sent to her by a death row prisoner in Atlanta, Georgia. Her move to rural Oxfordshire from London and her inner response to the beauty of the nature surrounding her. A more playful period experimenting with subjects and objects for their beauty, humour and resonance.
'Painting must be real and honest. It doesn’t need to be earnest, but it does need to provoke a visceral response – laughter, outrage or empathy, despair, a sense of mystery or just to be touched by its simple beauty. My work has been formed by many diverse elements – a formal training in a traditional portrait painter’s studio, an encounter with a prisoner on death row in the US, teaching art to refugees, prisoners and hospice patients and the wisdom of Buddhist philosophy. I am inspired by Rembrandt’s self-portraits, the frescoes of Fra Angelico as well as the work of Frida Kahlo, Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, Mark Rothko, Peter Doig and many more. Kafka wrote: ‘Books must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen in the soul’, and this resonates with me in painting. I have seen the transformative power of art in myself, in those whom I’ve taught, as well as in those who are impacted by the art they experience.' Simone Sandelson, 2026
