Cheow Lan Lake Painting

Hello, I am Simona I am a full-time Landscape Artist, creating unique artworks inspired by my own background, communicating the tranquillity of nature to help people escape the stress of everyday life. My passion for nature comes from growing up on the northern slopes of the Balkan mountain range. Since I started painting landscapes I have been investigating oil painting techniques derived from my tempera painting practice. My aim is to evoke the natural world I grew up in, and the new places I have explored on my travels since then. Sometimes I use my imagination to produce canvases that are a balance between what my eyes saw, and what my mind imagined. I hope these works are both exciting and thought-provoking, taking the viewer on a voyage of discovery, stimulating the mind and encouraging discussion. By transforming reality and reflecting on the inner-self, my paintings explore the psychological role that nature plays in our everyday lives. My work reflects the beauty, emptiness, rawness, and sheer power of nature. I aim to express these elements through oil paint; combining expressive brushstrokes and impasto technique with vibrant colours to create uplifting and magical scenarios. Truly the work of dreams. I am constantly developing my technique to explore the juxtaposition and interrelationship of contrasting forms and textures, revealing the beauty of nature. I like to create sense of drama and feeling of movement in my work. I want to represent reality, but show how it shifts in relation to both light and remembered experience. I love bright colours - they are energetic and vibrant- in oil paint, I use the Impasto technique , because it gives depth to the image, making the flat surface of the painting appear detailed and realistic. I use palette knife to apply thick layers of paint and depending on what texture I want to achieve I will either wait for each layer to dry before applying the next, or keep adding paint while it is still wet. I then add small details on top- trees, cracks in stone, water - applying thinner layers of paint with a brush. This approach takes a lot of time, but I believe this is what makes my work unique.