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bou Sioe
Full Author Bio
Dr. Simone is a mom to three lovely children, a physician, an oil finger painting artist and a children's book author. She loves to paint the beauty that she sees in the world around her, using bright colors and textures in her pieces. Through illustrated children's books she hopes to bring to life the beauty that is also within each of us.
Her interests and hobbies have foundations built in unexpected places and these lend to quite a diverse blend of qualities and skill sets that make her the artist she is today.
She was born and raised in South Africa with roots there extending as far back at the 1800 settlers. Coming from a divorced home, at the age of 17 she immigrated to the US where she worked hard to build a career in medicine and is now a practicing family physician. Her academic path was met with many challenges that made her question her strength and worth. Looking back now, she sees that this journey was one of self-discovery, self-love, self-forgiveness, and finding a more sustainable version of herself. She has a strong desire to serve others, but in her core she is an artist / maker.
Being a physician is an art in itself. She draws on details that her patients' share, imagines the cause of their afflictions, and creatively designs a treatment approach for helping them to recover. It is a dance - partnering with her patients to find the rhythm by which their health reverberates. When COVID struck and access to in-person healthcare was limited, she discovered the technique of oil finger painting which allowed her to capture the beauty she has seen in the world.
2.5 years into her self-taught painting career she was overwhelmed by post-partum depression and physician burnout. She stepped away from her healthcare career for several weeks to go through a personal "wintering" where she herself needed to rediscover self-love, forgiveness, and allow herself to pursue things that make her happy. She emerged from this "winter" as a new sustainable version of herself and has ever since been deeply inspired to instill these values in children while they are young. She hopes this will give them the strength to endure the cold harshness that the world can have at times, but more importantly encourage them to believe in themselves and their dreams above all things. This has formed the basis of her illustrated children's books. Her mind and heart work together to connect people, promote self-love, and portray the beauty that is in the world and within ourselves.