We’re excited to celebrate Vega Simone as our Fall 2025 Featured Artist! Vega’s creativity shines through their curiosity, care, and collaborative spirit. Inspired by the colors and textures of nature and the beauty of human connection, their art reflects a love for process and discovery.

As the creative mind behind our community mural Sound & Color, Vega encouraged everyone to express themselves freely with “no mistakes!” Their work reminds us that art is a shared experience that brings people together and celebrates every voice.

See our interview with Vega below:

What inspires your art? Most things inspire me; the colors and textures found in nature, the vast range of human connections, and abstract shapes that trick my eyes. The process itself is what inspires me the most, the journey of taking an idea and bringing it to life. I enjoy using materials that surprise me, like watercolor, printmaking, sculpting, and collage.

How do you feel when you’re creating? When I’m making art, my heart rate slows and I feel myself come back to my body. It’s taken a long time to get to this place. I used to put a lot of pressure on myself to share art that I thought was polished, which sometimes prevented me from finishing paintings or allowing myself to make art that grew on me over time. Now I make art without a firm end goal, knowing that something beyond my imagination will emerge within the process.

What would you say to anyone who wants to start making art? The first steps to making art are finding the materials you like and finding people who will encourage you to keep creating. My first drawings as a child were with a #2 pencil on blank printer paper from my mom's office. I loved drawing cartoon characters or people from my imagination to make stories about them.

What do you do with your completed pieces? To be honest, I will sit on paintings for years at a time before finishing or deciding I want to paint over them to make something else. Usually, I take a quality photo of my finished piece and then give it away to a friend, put it in a raffle, put it up in my house, or keep it in a canvas bag for a few years until someone convinces me to sell it.

How do you pick what you’re going to create? I have a sketchbook, so sometimes if I want to work on a large piece, I’ll flip through that to see what I can incorporate into what I’m working on at the moment. I also collaborate on projects with groups, where we brainstorm and make decisions together, so I have no idea what's going to happen, and I need to be the integrator of other people's ideas.