Simi Stone

Biography

Simi Stone (Simantha Mollylou Sernaker) American born artist from Woodstock, New York whose work spans painting, sculpture, music, and improvisation. Drawing from personal and collective histories, she transforms memory, grief, and resilience into immersive visual narratives where flowers, landscapes, and gestures become portals to the spirit. Rooted in materiality, improvisation, and spirituality, her practice in oil painting explores identity, ancestry, and social consciousness. Simi’s visual work has been exhibited in Boston, New York, and Rome where she was awarded a fellowship for plein air study in 2023. Simi obtained a BA in Studio Art from Bard College in 2024 and is currently completing her MFA ’26 at Tufts School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. 

Artist Statement

My country has become a stranger to me. Yet within these nightmares I sometimes glimpse a wisp of blue, a rose, or an orange blossom framed in soft gold—abstract forms with raw edges that spark my curiosity. The museum offers escape, comfort, and intrigue, until the confrontation with the past inevitably takes hold.

In response to omissions in cultural narratives I envision a personal salon-style installation, a parallel history, weaving together memory, myth, and lived experience. My process is rigorous and embodied. Material exploration, wall color choices, layering, and improvisation are as vital as the finished painting. Within these offerings I weave a fortress of bouquets mourning a lost lineage. Landscapes filled with flower petals and imagery from my very own universe where miracles occur regularly.

I grew up in Woodstock, New York. You could call me a flower child, though perhaps not in the expected way. I am a Black Jewish daughter of activist parents. I grew up meditating on my mother’s lap, believing in karma, reincarnation, and a direct line to God and guru.

Woodstock, a utopian enigma where pine forests stood aside country roads where beautiful mixed kids in Doc Martens roamed with no curfew. Barefoot preteens juxtaposed to shaved head skate punks holding boom boxes blasting Public Enemy and Bob Marley in town. Peace signs, filled streets with tie-dye shirts, and airbrushed prints of Jimi Hendrix hung in tourist shops. Our backdrop, the mountains of the Mohicans.  

Art was always my culture. I sang and danced before I could walk. I began playing violin at seven and was writing songs about war by fourth grade.

The journey has had highs and lows. Through it all, music and visual art have remained constant companions.

Within my work I draw upon, or reference, histories of landscape painting. For example, Constable went out and observed nature at a specific moment in time. He often even turned over his canvases and dated and time-stamped them because the work was about the present moment. He painted what was directly in front of him.

In a similar way my work responds to what is around me. But it’s not only about physical nature that can be seen—it’s also about a phenomenal environment or ecosystem understood as an affected landscape. The idea relates one’s rootedness to an embodied ritualistic place. 

The experience is psychological, emotional, and corporeal. I’m responding to the immediacy and “nowness” of a particular set of experiences. These moments are like dots along the path of an entire life. 

Nature and land have often been described in gendered terms—frequently as female. Because of that framing, land is often imagined as something to be conquered, overpowered, tamed, or used. Nature can be seen as benevolent, but it is also politicized through gender. It becomes something shaped by patriarchy, war, conflict, and systems of control. I practice the inverse. 

The study of flowers in art is not new. The tradition of still life painting from Dutch masters to Renaissance symbolism is what I build on, question, and reimagine these traditions through my own lens. Flowers function like a portal. There is a hidden rebellion ignited through the discipline of painting or sculpting them. Standing barefoot on the earth, I explore every color of a rose—the maroons and greens of Woodstock to the West Indies   make a map leading back to the heart.

Flowers bloom in death’s ashes—on war’s bloody battlefields. Red poppies and blue sunflowers appear in the most unlikely places, proof of life and resilience. Through painting I reconcile the experience of being alive. My process is alchemical. Within the hurricane of emotions that surge through thick oil paint, something transforms.

Right now, flowers are the form.

The writer and activist Audre Lorde once wrote that the task of the artist is to transform rage into something generative. I feel myself moving in that direction.

I continue digging for ancestral visions that have been buried or hidden from view. Painted flowers hold spells. Timeless symbols emerge from erasure. I suspect we possess powers we have not yet learned to recognize.

Every breath, stroke, and moment works toward the expression of inheritance-reckoning with history and with the present moment. The jewel is the action of putting paint to canvas. Weeks pass while paint dries and returns again: late nights, coffee, numb hands, frustration, and sudden inspiration. These are gifts intrinsic to the making of art. I never want to lose that process, no matter how difficult it becomes ppl.

I exist in a constant process—somewhere in the eye of the storm—searching for connections between my visual work, my music, and my words.

I paint flowers.

I take great comfort in nature.

I grew up surrounded by it.

Someone once asked me if painting flowers felt too saccharine.

My answer was simple: flowers saved my life.

Instagram: @simistoneofficial