Bio
Simon James is an English artist who lives and works in Munich, Germany. His work defies easy categorisation. He is a painter who creates sculptures on a canvas, layers of paint and meaning that have a physical, topographical quality with a careful consideration for the application and interplay of colour.
Painting is a process for understanding myself. Through it I dig deep and excavate the raw elements of my identity and experience, recycling fragments of the past to constitute a new present.
I was born and grew up in England. My formative years were spent hopping between different schools and institutions as my fathers business interests took us around the country.
I was constantly reinventing myself, scraping off and adding layers to my emerging identity depending on where I was. I ended up settling at an elite private school, where I did not fit in. I disliked the snobbery of the institution, and how these places try to break you down and build you up in their own image.
Ironically, I break apart and reconstitute my own paintings, to shape them into an image I decide. Perhaps, despite my best efforts to erase them, these experiences have left hidden traces in the deeper fabric of my consciousness.
Or it could just be that I’m a bit of a rebel at heart, an autodidact and someone who resists institutional thinking.
I came of age during the Thatcher years, which means that class conflict has been a central theme of my life. The miners' strikes, the football hooligans, the mods and rockers, the Unions versus the Tories are all ingrained in my political and social memory.
I have always felt more at home staring out at a gathering storm on the rugged North Sea coast, alone with my thoughts and the elements, than passing through the corridors of polite institutions.
I have always felt more at home painting on the streets of Munich, practising my German with curious passers by, than talking to art critics.
Germany has become my adopted home and moving here has given me a lot of freedom. Witnessing the reunification of East and West, a unique moment in history, has given me and my work a special energy. Living in a foreign country has broadened my perspectives, and has made me look upon England differently.
I have lived in Munich most of my adult life and am married to a German lady and have two children.
In 2002 I began making art which involved adding layers of Gesso on wooden panels and then reducing the surface by partially sanding the paint away. This is a young me showing the painting "Volta Face" in 2003 at my then studio in Ismaning.