Simon Angel is a queer, multi-media artist in the KCMO area who primarily explores portraiture through painting and photography.
Angel is most inspired by love and humanity. Capturing or rendering those he loves has always been his deepest expression of adoration. His practice is an attempt to not only connect to those he renders, but an effort to be understood himself.
Angel’s work is informed greatly by family. He is a third-generation artist after his mother, an abstract, non-figurative painter, and grandfather, a portrait and landscape artist. He is additionally influenced by his father and stepmother, who are photographers.
Angel frequently creates work exploring queer identity, bodies, experiences, and love. Taking inspiration from classical religious art and the old masters—including Caravaggio and Michelangelo—as well as photographers of the 1980’s—Mapplethorpe and Goldin—Angel is attracted to juxtaposition, duality, and the union of classical and contemporary.  He strives to elevate "disagreeable" subject matter—such as sexuality, eroticism, and visible transness—to a degree of "holiness" with detailed rendering, religious iconography, compositon, and theatricallity, such that he might inspire reverence for what might typically be deemed sinful, or unsightly. Apart from visual art, he has a fondness for poetry and story-telling, which often informs his painting, photography, and illustrative work.
When he is not capturing friends, lovers, family, and muses, Angel engages in self-portraiture towards self-explanation and self-love, particularly as a transgender individual who considers himself and his transness, additionally, an art project.​

Angel has interned for NASA’s Psyche Inspired program as an illustrator, and has been published and exhibited in 3x3 Magazine: International Illustration Show no. 20 and Society of Illustrators: 2023 Student Scholarship Competition Exhibition Catalog, the latter from which he received the $1,000 Lila and Ben Dryer Scholarship.