Artists

Simon Stone was born in 1952 in Lady Grey in the Eastern Cape. He attended Michaelis School of Fine Art and graduated in 1976 with an Advanced Diploma in Fine Art. This was followed by a study tour of Italian Renaissance Art in Italy. In the 1980s Stone worked as a part-time lecturer in lithography at the University of Witwatersrand and as a part-time teacher at the Johannesburg Art Foundation. He currently lives and works in Cape Town.

Stone is a prolific painter who has built an impressive reputation over the years. He is best known for his symbolic collage paintings of landscapes and figures created in a variety of media including oil, gouache and encaustic. Stone began making his own artist sketchbooks in 1984. He paints in these books each day, creating preliminary motifs for his canvases.

He has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Irma Stern Art Scholarship Award, University of Cape Town in 1976, and a Merit Award in the Volkskas Atelier in 1986. In 1993 he received the IGI Life Vita Art Now Lifetime Merit Award and in 1997 was the recipient of the New York City Award from the Ampersand Foundation. The documentary video Imagining Stone, featuring Stone’s life and work was recently produced by ARTMeetsTV.

Stone has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions both internationally and in South Africa, including, amongst others, the Investec Cape Town Art Fair in 2018 and 2020 and the Ampersand Foundation Award 21 years Celebration Exhibition, exhibited at the University of Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2019. The Standard Bank Gallery produced a retrospective exhibition of his work in 2015.

Simon Stone’s artworks are represented in private and public collections in Europe and the United States of America and in most South African art museum collections.

Image source: https://www.artskop.com/artist/simon-stone-48