An exotic and inspirational childhood laid the foundation for Simon Bull’s passionate creative vision. Coming from a Christian family had meant that a sense of God was always present with him, but as he grew older, a desire for a more tangible spiritual reality led him to the Bible and eventually to find in the person of Jesus, one who brought him the peace he so badly needed as well as a new purpose and sense of destiny.

As each year passed a deeper creative current seemed to pull at the artist. Once again it seemed that what had happened during his teens in the spiritual realm was now touching him in the creative realm; a sense of something more, of something waiting to be touched and expressed beyond the world of visible realities. He was moving away from painting the outward things, his canvases began to be expressions of the inner world, the world of the heart and of the spirit where the real life of mankind is felt and lived.

Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis the rich and vibrant style for which he has since become world famous began to find expression, to find a voice. It was not until his major one-man show at Harrods in London where seventy-six of his paintings were exhibited together, that the effect of this new work came home to him. "People were being transported, the colors and imagery were becoming a means of conveying the viewer into another world, the miracle was happening. People were being hit right in their emotional center."

In 2000 he won the Fine Art Trade Guild award for the top selling original print artist in Great Britain and was short listed twice for the best selling published artist award.  His Painting entitled “The Journey Never Ends” has also been awarded the National Association of Limited Edition Dealers print of the year in the United States, for “The graphic print whose artwork was the most outstanding in artistic quality and public appeal during 2003”.

He moved with his family to Carmel, California in 2003 where he now lives.  "If I can touch a life. If through my painting I can show something previously unseen. If I can reveal something old in a new way, if I can enrich a soul on it’s journey into the eternal, then my painting, my living, has not been in vain."

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Jia Lu has a highly animated, magnetic personality that seems at odds with her highly focused, other-worldly oil paintings.  With curly hair escaping from the clutches of a comb, flashing eyes and a restless energy, Jia Lu exudes an infectious enthusiasm and curiosity.  At first she talks about her work as though sharing a secret with her audience, drawing them into a private world of personal confessions and observations about growing up in China or living in America.  She then reveals a familiarity with literature and philosophy that demonstrates her approach to painting is not merely autobiographic or expressionist, but layered and more complex.

Jia Lu was born in 1954 in Beijing, China, where she worked as a nurse, an actor, a navy officer, an art editor and as a professional basketball trainee before enrolling in the Central Academy of Art and Design to begin her professional training as an artist.  As the daughter of two artists, Lu came by her talents naturally and has exhibited her work in national and international exhibitions since childhood.

"For me the challenge is to create beauty," say Lu, "to better persuade my viewers to look again at their lives and the world around them. I want to share that passion with my viewers, through my painting." As a result, Jia Lu's paintings belong to a tradition of narrative, realistic art that speaks for itself.  Nevertheless her work has much in common with contemporary figurative trends. Though clearly influenced by Buddhist philosophy and her Asian background, as well as European symbolism, Jia Lu's style defies simple classification.

Jia Lu now lives and paints in Los Angeles.