Hi everyone, welcome to my brand spanking new website! This is my first blogpost for this new version of simonite.com. So to start, I feel like I should introduce myself to people who may find my blog through FASO, the company that provides this website. I am an artist from Winnipeg, Canada who specializes in a style I call Cubo-Weirdism. If you’re seeing my work for the first time today, you’ll notice that everything you’re seeing seems like some kind of weird hybrid of Cubism and Realism mixed with Pop Art and that’s exactly what Cubo-Weirdism is. Well not all of it is Pop-Art, but that’s what you’ll find on the website currently.
So you’re probably asking yourself, how the hell did this happen? Why Cubo-Weirdism? Well, it all started when I asked myself the question: “what would happen if I mashed up Picasso-like Cubism with realistic rendering?” So I did one, then I did another and then I couldn’t stop! It was only a few weeks ago that I coined the term to describe this work, but it really seems to suit this style which is particularly influenced by the American artist George Condo. If you don’t know Condo’s work, but you like mine, I recommend looking him up. But mine’s a little more affordable! Just saying’!
When I work on a Cubo-Weirdist painting I can’t help but think about how very strange it is that a subject is so recognizable even when I exaggerate and move their features around. In fact, for now at least, my brand new website is completely dedicated to this style of work. You can see right here on www.simonite.com (yes, I own my own last name.com, how lucky is that?) that I have largely focused on characters from Popular Culture. As of now that’s all you will find on the site, but I have created a fair number of paintings of imagined characters as well as animals in the Cubo-Weirdist style. So please check back frequently as new categories of work will be added in the future along with lots of new Pop-Culture paintings too! In fact, to celebrate this blogpost, here is a brand new painting of Hannibal Lector that I’m titling Cannibal. It’s available right now. I also have some earlier work that I’m pretty proud of that is not done in this style and that work will eventually make it to the site.
Cannibal, 11″ x 14″, oil on canvas, 2021.
Anyway, If you follow me on social media or have visited my old site in the past, you’ll know that the old site was perfectly fine if you were interested in seeing some of my work or if you were wondering what I’d been up to recently. But if you landed on the site through Instagram or Facebook and thought: “hmmm, I wonder how much such and such a painting costs”, well, there was no info available on that and you certainly couldn’t purchase directly through the site. Well, all that has changed, so feel free to have a look at what’s available, and even what it might look like hanging in your office or living room, or even your kitchen! Also please sign up for my email list to receive updates about new works and who-knows-what else! I’m constantly making new works, usually two and sometimes three a week, though that could slow down once this Covid nightmare ends, but that’s a subject for another post. And I post to the Cubo-Weirdist blog every Tuesday, so stay tuned!