Stefka Simons is a visual artist who works across mixed techniques: drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, and, now and then, installation. She likes the moment when one medium spills into another, when a drawn line wanders into paint, or a printed texture becomes the ground for something new.
She is trained at the Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts, where she built the foundation that still carries her today.
A love of materials, a respect for craft, and the patience to let an image arrive in its own time rather than forcing it. What she took from those years is a way of looking, curious, open, and unafraid to follow an idea wherever it leads.Her work often starts from nature, though rarely by describing it directly. She works on warm, toned paper and lets colour stay soft and muted, until a single stroke of orange or coral arrives like a heartbeat under the surface. She trusts the accident of a pooled wash as much as the control of a careful line, and much of the life in her work comes from that meeting of the two. Her images are made to be felt rather than explained. They leave room for the viewer to wander in and find their own way.
Stefka Simons works from her studio in Hilversum and is active in Amsterdam as well as in Catalunya. The studio is where the slow work happens: the trying, the undoing, the beginning again, and where materials are given the time they need to become something.
There is another side to her practice that matters just as much. Stefka teaches art and walks alongside young people who are moving through some of the harder chapters of their lives. She meets each of them where they are, with patience and without judgment, and offers creativity as a way in. A blank sheet becomes a safe place to experiment, to fail without fear, and to discover that one’s own voice is worth trusting.
For Stefka, art is not only something to look at. It is something that can steady a person and give them back to themselves.
At the heart of everything, in the studio and in the classroom alike, is sincerity. The work is offered openly, with warmth and a little play, and without pretense. You are welcome to step closer, to look, and to make of it what you will.