Simon Breed: The story of my lives
I’m incredibly lucky. I’m on my fourth life. I reckon I’ve got a few more in me too.
I moved to New Zealand from the UK some 20 years back. I’m an painter who also does stuff like make the coffee at Twenty CX - an award-winning marketing agency. I keep reasonably fit and surf as regularly as life allows - though to be honest, not as often or as well as I’d like.
So, what was it about those lives?
First life - A childhood artist
My first life was spent in the art rooms of school in Tunbridge Wells, in the heart of the UK’s Garden of England - Kent. I should have been in Economics, English, or History, but Art always won out - as it has so often since. Art feeds my soul like nothing else and remained my passion throughout my childhood and teens.
Second life - Voyager in need of a mission
I got a place at Medway College on an art foundation course (the pre-lim to a BA in Fine Art at that point), but I had already decided I needed to escape Blighty. To fund my travels, I started working for the IT department of a major company and found I had a knack for solving business problems with code. Thus started my first career. It was never to be my destiny of course, but I got to tick off my goal to travel the world.
On a global trip that would last 2 years or so I did everything from designing tee-shirts to banana picking and running a backpackers hostel. I also created my first business venture. “The Backpackers Balls” became a successful but short-lived Auckland institution that sold for the price of two trips around NZ to a company called Kiwi Experience.
Things went swimmingly until I got back to London and the big recession of the early 90s. After stunted stints in sales, I side-stepped into marketing. Once again, I found a knack and a new mission. I devoted the next several years to evening school to learn the theory whilst on a daily basis putting that theory into practice. When I left London ten years later, I was on the leadership team for one of London’s best agencies.
Third Life - NZ and building a business
Looking for new adventures, my partner and I relocated to the place I loved most from my travels. Successfully ensconced in a new life in New Zealand and now with a baby in tow, I co-founded Twenty CX. Twenty went on to become a successful award-winning agency working with some great brands and NZ businesses.
My creative streek was ever-present but simply channeled differently. It was only a matter of time before my first love resurfaced though.
Fourth Life - The painter re-emerges
I always loved classical paintings. Works by the Renaissance greats like Da Vinci and Caravaggio. The portraiture of Rembrandt, Sergant, and from New Zealand, Charles Goldie. The skies of Turner, the landscapes and animals of Henry Landseer. I loved the energy in the early work of Picasso and Salvador Dali’s manic surrealism. Yet modern art seemed to celebrate something different.
The ‘contemporary’ modern art that I experience in some galleries leaves me cold. Some of it is nice design and cool colours, but it doesn’t talk to me. It put me off any thoughts of working with art for years. Then I started seeing something new emerge - the Renaissance revisited perhaps, but with a distinctively new voice. The likes of Odd Nerdrum (Rembrandt reincarnate), Banksy (always uniquely poignant), and Cesar Santos (who lends realism a glorious twist). Experiencing the work of these new greats inspired me to pick up my brushes, sharpen my pencils, and get into a studio again.
Lots of people have talent, but talent in itself is never enough. It takes commitment, study and no end of practice to evolve the techniques needed for a vision to emerge on canvas in the way you want. To that end, I spent much of my free time over the last decade practicing and learning about painting: composition; the complexities of colour; the stories and techniques of the old masters (they seemed like a reasonable place to start); oil painting processes. I’m on a mission to create paintings of beauty that will endure. Every picture builds on the experience of the last, but I’ll always be striving to improve and create better work.
Nowadays I’m privileged to be able to put in time in the studio and paint alongside my work with our agency clients. It’s a happy mix, keeping me grounded, fresh and energized around my art.
Art is very personal, so I hope my paintings connect and that each piece has a little story in it for you, captured for an eternity in oil.
So here’s to the lives we lead - past, present, hidden. And to the lives we still have left to unlock. Stay inspired and remember to create better every day.
Capturing the story of our lives on canvas
It’s this sense of the lives we lead that inspires some of my art. We all have a depth beyond the obvious - a story that draws on the real, the imaginary, our yin and yang. I try to bring some of those stories to the surface in each piece.