My name is Simone Sackett, and I am a painter from Sacramento, California. I create works that embody themes of preserving memory, family dynamics, and nature through various painting mediums.

Home to me is the levee roads and winding rivers of the Sacramento, California Delta. An often mundane and frustrating task, experiencing the long periods of travel to and from town during my adolescence, gave me the unique mental time to reflect and process my daily experiences and routines. Travels on the same roads allowed me to intensely absorb and engage with my surroundings. The delta never failed to provide endless breathtaking sunsets, animal encounters, and essential developmental conversations with family members or singularly, with myself.

Now that I’m far from home and I can feel its lingering absence, painting is my way of returning to the spaces in which I feel most comfortable. Placing an emphasis on atmosphere, I portray morning mist, light passing through trees, and reflective surfaces of water as characters with unique qualities and ways of feeling. Driven by memory, my work hinges on faded experiences. The light that peeks through these memories feels warm and vivid. Exact forms from these moments may be forgotten, but the translated tangible feelings are not. When my life feels chaotic, my art practice is a space for me to organize the chaos and explore it through my fluid painting process and intentional but generous use of line. My works are souvenirs and diary entries that memorialize serene moments. But my works also serve a higher purpose, allowing me to communicate the intrinsic value of all of my subjects, explore new ways of interpreting them, and reclaim my faded memories to share with others.