Former PR professional Joanna Simeone has followed her artistic passion, after a few other endeavors along the way.
Joanna Simone: “I feel like, through my artwork, I’m able to communicate some universal truths and encourage people to take steps toward living an authentic life.”
One night while Joanna Simeone was sitting on the back deck, working on an art piece for a client after 2-year-old Sophia and baby Hunter went to bed, she looked up at the sky and suddenly knew what she wanted to name her new business.
Simeone, 38, owner of Milk Moon House studio in Louisville, Tennessee, had been searching for a phrase that would be easy to remember. It also needed to be spiritual without being preachy.
“The moon was so full, and it was so big,” she recalls of that evening. “The moon in May is called the milk moon, and it’s the moon of abundance, the moon of plenty. It’s all about growing.”
The youngest of three siblings, Simeone grew up near Chicago and often spent time on projects that combined art and nature.
“My older sister is part genius, so I knew very early on that I wasn’t bent that way for logic,” she says. “I was far more on the emotional side.”
She was also independent, a trait she inherited from her hippie parents, and was voted most individualistic in high school. But practicality set in when she realized how hard it would be to make a living as an artist, so she squashed her dreams and majored in advertising and public relations at Southern Illinois University, five hours from her urban hometown.
Simeone and her future husband, Peter, loved camping and hiking and felt at home with the slower pace of the college’s rural setting. So after graduation, the couple began looking for a place to live that would nurture their passion for the outdoors. In 2006, they moved to Knoxville, where Peter got a job at a TV station and she accepted a public relations position at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital. Her college internship at Children’s Organ Transplant Association—she chose the nonprofit because her nephew had cystic fibrosis—had prepared her to advocate for sick kids.
“My heart was deeply drawn to children,” she says. “I felt like I knew a little bit about what parents were going through, so that was a good match.”
Soon after their daughter was born, Peter received a promotion and Simeone was able to stay home, where she started painting tiny abstracts for fun.
“I don’t know if it was just the freedom of having some space and time, or just literally birth undoing something,” she says. “But my creative juices came back.”
Joanna Simone’s “word paintings” range from simple phrases such as “Home is where my boys are,” to longer pieces, such as above. All are framed in upcycled wood.
The necessity for furniture to fill up the large house they were building in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, along with the budding trend of milk painting, prompted Simeone to start repurposing beat-up, outdated pieces with “word art”—a song lyric here, a scripture verse there—and inspiring images. “I was great with imperfection and I kind of had an eye for things,” she says. “I started doing it for myself, and then friends would come over and be like, ‘That’s great. Could you do it for me?’”
Before long, Simeone’s hobby had grown into a full-fledged business, with Peter in charge of custom shelving, barn doors and other woodworking projects. Milk Moon House boomed, with Simeone spending much of her time in the spacious studio her husband built for her.
But as the years passed, she says, “I realized that I was working to pay for all the nice things that I thought I wanted. We kind of got caught in the grind of living to work. My husband was working all the time, and what started as a fun craft was now about the income. We had gotten all the nice cars and our mortgage was huge. We had a little bit of an undoing where nothing was really functioning healthy, including our marriage and our finances.”
Around the same time, her next-door neighbor asked her if she could replicate a painting, and she agreed to try. She showed it to the members of her mom’s group, and they started ordering her art pieces.
“It sounds cheesy, but it’s amazing what a bunch of women can do when they get together,” she says, “especially if there’s some amount of desire to support one another.”
To simplify their lives, a few years ago the Simeones decided to sell their fancy cars and big house. One day they drove past a fixer-upper half the size of their own place just as a little old man was hammering a For Sale sign on the mailbox.
“It was like, ‘This is perfect,’” Simeone says. “It was just small and weird. [The owner] told me the price he needed, and that’s exactly what we wanted to pay. So we bought it right then.”
She now focuses on acrylic abstracts and word paintings with sayings like “Home is where my boys are,” “You belong here,” and “Savor it,” which she sells primarily at Knoxville Chocolate Co. and Bradley’s Chocolate, also in Knoxville.
“I feel like, through my artwork, I’m able to communicate some universal truths and encourage people to take steps toward living an authentic life that suits them and not play by somebody else’s rules,” says Simeone, who describes herself as empathetic and an “extroverted introvert” who loves people but needs to be alone to recharge. She is currently homeschooling her son and nursing a foot injury before she hopefully runs a half-marathon. Her spouse has started his own new construction and remodeling business.
Instead of upcycling discarded wood into furniture, Simeone now uses it to frame her artwork. The Knox Heritage Salvage Shop, a nonprofit initiative that works to keep donated historic building materials out of the landfill, contacts her when they get a 200-year-old mantel or pieces of ornate molding from an abandoned downtown structure.
“There’s something so satisfying about using reclaimed wood, just giving things another life,” she says. “Maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten older, but I feel like there’s innate, cherished history down here and a reverence for things that have a story. I love the idea of keeping something for another use instead of just trashing it.”
But the greatest payoff may be the feedback from customers. “I get an enormous amount of emails and phone calls and messages from people who’ve either ordered something or been gifted something or bought it at a store, and they give me a full rundown of why they needed a reminder like this or why they love it,” Simeone says. “I don’t take that lightly, and I’m really grateful. Furniture was fun, but this is really fulfilling.”
For more info see Joanna Simeone’s Milk Moon House Facebook page; a new e-commerce website is in the works.
THREE EASY WAYS TO SPRUCE UP FOR SPRING WITH OLD WOOD
1. Assemble a unique picture frame.
According to Joanna Simeone, an East Tennessee artist who repurposes old wood for her frames, “A lot of salvage stores will cut it for you. Have them cut 2-inch strips. You can create a frame pretty easily by just doing 45-degree-angle cuts.”
2. Make a centerpiece.
Build a four-sided container and set Mason jars in it with seasonal flowers. Says Simeone, “You’ve got yourself an instant sweet little setup.”
3. Show off your memories.
Craft an open window box with salvaged wood, hang a tiny “clothesline” inside with string, and use clothespins to attach your favorite spring break photos or other mementos.
The story above appears in our March/April, 2020 issue. For more subscribe today or log in to the digital edition with your active digital subscription. Thank you for your support!