Simon Bull

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 Bull's family moved to South America while he went to boarding school in England. His father was a minister, which would result in family moves around the world. The next four years provided a heady cocktail of experiences for an impressionable young mind. The tough school regime, contrasted with times of adventure with his family in South America.

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 in Hong Kong 1976, Simon Bull remembers a major one-man show at Harrods in London: I began for the first time to understand what my paintings had become. The people were telling me! The colors and imagery were becoming a means of conveying the viewer into another world! People were being hit right in their emotional center.

Worldwide success greeted the emergence of Simon Bull. He was short listed for England's most prestigious art awards; winning outright the Artist Print award for the United Kingdom. Best selling artist printmaker and being short listed for the Published Artist Award, the first time any British artist has been short listed for the two awards.

In 2000 he won the Fine Art Trade Guild award for the top selling original print artist in Great Britain and was short listed twice for the best selling published artist award.

His Painting entitled "The Journey Never Ends" has also been awarded the National Association of Limited Edition Dealers print of the year in the United States, for "The graphic print whose artwork was the most outstanding in artistic quality and public appeal during 2003".

He moved with his family to Carmel California in 2003 where he, his wife Joanna and children now live.

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."