Painting
Oil on canvas, watercolor and signed prints. Rooms, landscapes seen through a car window, jungle leaves and night skies, built up until they sit somewhere between the real thing and the remembered one.
See the artAbout
Simone Chagoya
Simone is a painter and jewelry maker in Chicago. She paints in oil and watercolor, strings natural gemstone necklaces by hand, and works with color the same way across all of it.
BFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2011
Background
Simone grew up in Illinois, about an hour outside Chicago. Family trips into the city meant museums, neighborhoods, restaurants and festivals, and the city stayed with her.
She studied painting and art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and earned her BFA in 2011. Two of the paintings on this site, Altered Beliefs and Regarding My Wayward Ways, hung in her BFA exhibition that May.
Memory has run through the work ever since. The paintings come from rooms, places and objects she remembers from childhood. The necklaces follow the same method: color first, then light, then how the stones sit together.
- Education
- BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2011
- Exhibitions
- Penny Lane Studios, Logan Square, Chicago, 2024
- BFA Exhibition, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2011
- Mediums
- Oil on canvas, watercolor and ink, digital painting, natural gemstones
- Lives and works
- Chicago, Illinois
Artist statement
- Memory is the main influence throughout my work.
- I combine my memories of places, times or objects into the piece.
- This distorts the real physical depiction into an altered image.
- The altered image then includes, excludes or manipulates what the real place or objects actually were or are.
- It is a greater representation of both the real and my memory.
- Many of my paintings can be related back to childhood or to the places I have been.
- Memory is not always accurate; it can even change over time.
- As I have grown older I want more and more to remember these things and to still have some grasp on them.
Jewelry
Natural gemstones chosen the way a painter chooses color, then strung by hand. Every necklace is named for what it holds: Smoke, Cosmic, Brazil, Baja and the rest. Most are made once.
Shop necklaces
Say hello.
Questions about a piece, a commission or a stockist inquiry. Simone reads every message.