Using an intense colour palette Dawood builds up layers of highly saturated paint. Her compositions are often partially abstracted and playful…

Based deep in the remote Wiltshire countryside Simone paints the surrounding landscape. Working mainly in oil on pre-primed linen canvases that she constructs herself.

Using an intense colour palette she builds up layers of highly saturated paint. Her compositions are often partially abstracted and playful. Superficially the seemingly simple graphic shapes mask a complex process of composition, balance and response to her subject. Colours give the impression of vibrating across the picture plane.

From clumps of trees on the horizon of The Ridgeway to a desolated barn in a field, there is a sense of isolation and vastness of both sky and land. The soft contours and folds of the hillsides ripple and echo forming pleasing but sometimes unlikely patterns that are somehow connected to those that used this land in ancient times; farmers, travellers, shamans, druids, seekers. Long Barrows, Hill Forts, Sarsen Stones and the ubiquitous White Horse Figures.

Simone studied at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art in Chelsea and London Drawing School. She was initially taught to paint as child by the acclaimed food writer Claudia Roden who herself started her career as a successful artist.