Kia ora, I’m Simon Olsen, a contemporary painter based in Pōneke Wellington.

I use oil paint to explore experiences that resist easy explanation: vulnerability, uncertainty, acceptance and renewal. I am particularly interested in the moments where something begins to shift internally, before it can be fully understood or expressed.

My paintings are built through palette knives, strong contrasts and layers of thick, marbled paint. I want them to create an immediate physical encounter, one that is felt before it is interpreted. Colour establishes the emotional atmosphere, moving between intense, luminous passages and quieter, earthier tones. Sculptural surface is central to this visual language. Ridges hold resistance, fractured passages suggest vulnerability or strain, and smoother areas offer moments of release. As light moves across the paint, parts of the image emerge and recede, echoing the tension between what is visible and what remains unseen. I hold my subjects at the edge of abstraction. The figure offers recognition and human connection, while abstraction introduces movement, instability and meanings that cannot be neatly resolved. This tension reflects the uncertain and often incomplete nature of personal change.

My latest body of work began with a deeply personal portrait that remained unfinished for twenty years. Returning to complete it transformed my relationship with both the grief it held and my creative practice. An unexpected interaction between linseed oil and thick paint produced puckered, light-catching folds resembling water. This material accident revealed how paint could behave like emotion, holding beauty, instability and transition simultaneously. Texture became not simply a technique, but a source of meaning. This process also deepened my understanding of painting as a way of approaching difficult experience through presence, attention and compassion. From this discovery grew a series of faces emerging through water, light and shadow. Each figure occupies a space between concealment and revelation, resistance and surrender, dissolution and renewal. The paintings do not offer easy resolutions. They remain within the unsettled space of change, where pain may soften, acceptance may emerge and something new may begin to surface.

Although the work is informed by lived experience, it is not intended to prescribe a particular meaning. I want each painting to remain open enough for viewers to bring their own memories, questions and associations to it. I believe close attention can transform how we experience ourselves and the world around us. Painting cannot resolve every difficulty, but it can make space for presence, recognition and new ways of seeing. I hope the work invites you to slow down, move closer and consider both what the surface reveals and what it withholds.

Ngā mihi nui,
Simon

Artist biography

Simon Olsen is a contemporary painter based in Pōneke Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Working primarily in oils, he uses layered impasto, palette-knife techniques, strong contrasts and shifting colour to explore psychological change, emotional complexity and renewal.

His debut solo exhibition, Right Under My Nose, was held at Thistle Hall Gallery in 2025 and featured in Regional News. The majority of the exhibited works were acquired by private collectors. Later that year, his painting Surrender received second place in the People’s Choice Award at the annual Inverlochy Art School Exhibition.

His forthcoming solo exhibition, Surfacing: Things Not Seen, opens at Exhibitions Gallery of Fine Art in Wellington in December 2026.