To stand before a monumental canvas by Simon Barlow is to encounter a fleeting, fragile perfection held captive in time. His subjects—intricate peonies, delicate tulips, and sweeping magnolias—emerge from void-like darkness, their petals kissed by an ethereal, dramatic luminosity. They are not merely still lifes; they are profound, towering portraits of transience, commanding spaces that span up to two by three meters. Yet, to understand the sheer scale and profound depth of his current botanical masterpieces, one must trace the artist’s journey back to a vastly different landscape, a different medium, and a completely different way of seeing the world.
Simon’s artistic evolution is a testament to the necessity of reinvention. From the rugged bushveld of Southern Africa to the contemporary gallery spaces of Australia, his trajectory is one of continuous exploration—a relentless search for the perfect visual language to express the delicate, ultimately tragic beauty of life itself.
Long before he was navigating massive canvases with heavy acrylics and oils, Simon was a boy mesmerized by the natural world. Growing up in Southern Africa, his earliest visual memories were steeped in the region's rich diversity of flora and fauna. Like many of his peers, he spent his spare time immersed in the bush, collecting bird's eggs and butterflies. However, unlike his contemporaries, Simon compulsively documented his findings through drawing and painting.
His innate talent revealed itself early. At just sixteen years old, while attending boarding school deep in the Zimbabwean bush, he sold his first painting—a delicate watercolor of a Peregrine Falcon.
"It was a confirmation of sorts of my passion and efforts," Simon reflects. "Rather than the monetary transaction, it was encouragement to pursue further what was then just a hobby and a distraction from schoolwork."
Despite this early validation, a career in fine art wasn't an immediate certainty. While he recognized his inherited natural talent, he lacked a concrete vision for his future. Painting birds shifted from a childhood hobby into an obsession, becoming a de facto occupation that provided much-needed direction.
Formal training eventually grounded this raw passion. Simon attended art school in South Africa, studying Graphic Design. While he admits in hindsight that he perhaps should have listened to his foundation year director and majored in painting, the Graphic Design program instilled in him something arguably more crucial for his long-term survival as a creative: discipline.
The rigorous demands of graphic design forged a formidable work ethic, an attribute he now considers invaluable and essential for any artist. Beyond the discipline, art school reinforced a critical artistic truth. Under the guidance of an influential drawing teacher, Barlow learned that robust drawing skills and a keen understanding of composition are the fundamental bedrock of all artistic expression—a principle that continues to anchor his work decades later.
Armed with discipline and a profound connection to his environment, Simon spent the early chapter of his career as a highly successful wildlife artist living in the Cape, South Africa. Inspired by the breathtaking landscapes of South Africa and the cultural appreciation for wildlife art at the time, he dedicated himself to the meticulous craft of watercolor.
Working with fine sable brushes, he studied the mid-19th-century ornithological masters, learning how to balance a subject with its immediate surroundings. This period was characterized by intense, scientific observation. His magnum opus of this era was illustrating the Gamebirds of Southern Africa, a monumental, three-year labor of love.
The project required him to travel extensively across Southern Africa, exploring diverse habitats, collecting references, and collaborating closely with ornithologists. Working from photographs, sketches, drawings, and physical specimens, Simon produced scientifically sound, hyper-detailed illustrations.
Yet, as he mastered the medium, his internal artistic compass began to shift. The intense focus required to perfectly replicate the physical reality of a bird began to feel restrictive.
"My relationship with nature and observation has now evolved to focus on a concept rather than for the sake of the recording of a specific subject or species," he notes, looking back at his watercolor years. "My earlier expression was a vehicle to explore the representation of my subject. It is now to explore what the subject means to me."
The catalyst for Simon’s massive stylistic pivot was a profound life change: emigration. Relocating to Sydney, Australia brought with it the harsh realities of fundamental change—a new culture, an unfamiliar art market, and the base human instinct of survival.
This dramatic shift in environment forced him entirely out of his comfort zone. It was a deeply intimidating and testing period, marked by moments of self-doubt, rejection, and exhausting hours in the studio with little immediate reward. However, the pressure of a new beginning also provided the ultimate artistic liberation.
Simon made the bold decision to leave his delicate watercolors and fine sable brushes behind. The medium that had brought him early success had become physically and mentally suffocating. Watercolor, by its very nature, demands unforgiving mental concentration and exacts a heavy toll on the body. Seeking a more robust, painterly approach, he embraced heavier acrylics, oils, and bristle brushes, expanding his work to a larger, more physical scale.
Transitioning from intricate watercolors to sweeping canvases changed the very act of creation. Navigating canvases that stretch meters wide requires an entirely different approach to composition. What works on a small scale falls apart on a large one. It demanded more physical space in the studio, greater bodily strength, and, most importantly, the sheer confidence to commit bold strokes of paint to a massive void.
Today, Simon’s portfolio is defined by his grand-scale floral portraits. He has found his artistic "home" in the intricate folds of peonies, the elegant curves of tulips, and the robust forms of magnolias. The peony, in particular, captivates him, serving as what he considers the ultimate challenge in his genre—a subject that is simultaneously intricate, delicate, and immensely powerful.
He approaches these blooms not as traditional still lifes but as distinct, individual portraits. Every flower on his canvas possesses its own character, its own personality, and its own commanding presence.
To achieve the mesmerizing luminosity that defines his current work, Simon draws profound inspiration from the visceral realism of Caravaggio. A chance encounter with an exhibition of Caravaggio and his school at a local state gallery struck a deep chord within him. The dramatic use of light—chiaroscuro—became the guiding force behind his new aesthetic.
The magic of his painting lies in the tension between the dark, stark background and the delicate subject. They cannot exist in isolation; they must interact to create drama. Translating a flower from the dark void into the light relies entirely on the foundational drawing skills he honed forty years ago in art school.
His process for achieving this is intensely disciplined. Operating with the rigor learned at art school, Simon works nine- or ten-hour days, six days a week, in his studio. With music or podcasts playing in the background, he immerses himself in a state of flow.
"Painting for me takes on a trance-like process," he explains. "With each stroke of the brush, each breath, I find a rhythm that takes me away to my idyll. It is much like the feeling that yoga or swimming brings."
A single piece can take one to two weeks of this focused, rhythmic breathing and painting, with larger, more complex works demanding even more time.
Beneath the visual splendor of Simon’s large-scale botanicals lies a deeply philosophical thematic core. His recent work, beautifully encapsulated in his solo exhibition ‘Remaining Light’, is a profound exploration of transience and mortality.
Flowers, with their inherently short lifespans, serve as the perfect vessels for this message. They perfectly capture the trajectory of human existence—beautiful, delicate, powerful, and ultimately, inescapably tragic.
In Simon’s canvases, the viewer encounters the ethereal remnants of light caressing the surfaces of the petals. His paintings reveal both the obvious and the suggested, playing on the edge of the tangible and the enigmatic. They are visual elegies, honoring life's final moments of wonder before the inevitable decay.
By capturing these blooms in a state of suspended animation right before they wither, Simon isolates a specific, fleeting moment of fragile perfection. It is a moment free from adversity, pain, or fear—an image that bypasses the logical mind and strikes directly at the primitive subconscious, rendering it impossible to look away.
Today, Simon Barlow has successfully established a formidable presence in the Australian art scene, bolstered by his vital partnership with the Studio Gallery Group across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. This gallery relationship has provided him the space to flourish, connecting his monumental visions with collectors who resonate with the emotional gravity of his work.
When a collector brings one of Simon’s monumental botanical pieces into their home, the artist’s ultimate hope is that the canvas transfers the exact energy and emotion he felt while painting it in his studio.
Despite the shift in scale, medium, and continent, Barlow’s personal definition of success remains remarkably similar to the feelings of that sixteen-year-old boy in Zimbabwe. Success is still found in the quiet satisfaction of a hard day's work. It is the ability to look back at a canvas and know he has fulfilled his obligation to his craft and to those who support his pursuit.
Looking to the future, Simon balances private commissions with steadily preparing for an upcoming solo exhibition in Melbourne November 2026. While the subjects and the monumental scale will remain consistent, his internal journey is far from over.
"I continue to explore my craft of painting and refining my skill and, ultimately, the finished painting," he states, recognizing the infinite horizon of his chosen discipline. "It will never end. I need another lifetime."
- Vincent Gotti, Artscene+ Magazine May/June 2026