Simon Pierse

The watercolour artist with a flair for finding beauty in the harshest of landscapes tells REBECCA BRADBURY about his love of emptiness and extremes

- REBECCA BRADBURY

An artist who mainly paints landscapes in watercolour is of course not a surprise in itself. However, it is somewhat of a revelation when you discover the artist was born and bred in London and studied at the capital’s Slade School of Fine Art where the emphasis was very much on painting still life and the figure in oil.

The man who has carved out this trajectory from a city-dwelling, formally trained oil painter to a watercolourist renowned for his big, desolate landscapes is Simon Pierse.

Now a member of the Royal Watercolour Society, Simon left art school in 1979 and began an Italian government scholarship in Florence. On meagre earnings, he bought a sketchpad and watercolour set and began to paint landscapes that caught his eye while travelling around southern Italy.

A trip to Australia’s otherworldly Red Centre, the desert region around Alice Springs, changed everything. Simon was visiting his girlfriend (now wife) who was on an exchange in the country at the time.

The experience cemented his yearning for the extreme desert and mountain scenes that continue to frequent his work today.

“I became really drawn to this landscape,” he says. “It enables you to experience solitude, emptiness and quietness. It has this extraordinary pinky-red sand and no trees to speak of. It’s flat and open with lots of space, and from that I developed into a painter of what I would call ‘barren’ landscapes – and mountains were an extension of that.”