[6] While in school, Simpson worked the graveyard shift at a gas station and managed the campus cafeteria to cover tuition costs.
Simpson has said that studying under professors like Clyfford Still, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff helped him realize that he, too, could make a living teaching and producing art.
[5] In 1954, Simpson co-founded the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco alongside Wally Hedrick, a neo-expressionist painter and integral member of the Beat movement ; Deborah Remington, an abstract artist known for hard-edge painting abstraction; Jack Ryan, a poet; Hayward Ellis King, an artist who became the director of the Richmond Art Center, and Jack Spicer, a poet and faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute.
[5] Herb Caen wrote in the San Francisco Examiner on September 26, 1954 that the Six Gallery was "sponsored by six people interested in art, music, poetry, integrity and other worthwhile things.
[8]"Howl's" future publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet Michael McClure, and Jack Kerouac were in the audience, but Simpson, home sleeping after a night shift at his gas station job, missed the reading.
[11] In 1953, Simpson and Dee lived in the same house as Hedrick and his wife, the artist Jay Defeo (best known for her ten-foot masterpiece, The Rose), on Bay Street in San Francisco.
[5] Defeo, who worked in numerous mediums including drawing, collage, photography, jewelry, and sculpture, was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2013.
"[2] Their abstract glazes and references to fog and sky caught the attention of the critic Clement Greenberg, who included Simpson in his seminal 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art alongside thirty other artists including Frank Stella, Thomas Downing, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ellsworth Kelly.
In 1958, Simpson had the first solo exhibition of his career at the San Francisco Art Association gallery, and two years later he participated in the International Sky Festival in Osaka, Japan, both times showing his horizontal stripes paintings.
Interference paints, which have only six pigment variations containing micro-particles covered with titanium oxide, reflect and refract light, giving rise to nuances of color and optical illusions of depth.
[2][5] In 2011, Simpson had his seventh solo show, Nonsense Poems, at the Haines Gallery in San Francisco, which featured 19 new interference paintings with one-syllable titles such as Blink and Ring.
He spent the following twenty years amassing one of the most important private collections of postwar American art in the world—over 2,500 pieces by artists including Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd.
[21] Upon his death, Dr. Panza donated a large number of Simpson's interference paintings to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.
[22] "In the 1970s, Simpson's painting would have taken its place more readily in the narrower context of color-field abstraction, a tendency more associated with New York than the Bay Area.
They may appear to present themselves wholly at a glance, because they conceal nothing, but it takes time to size up how any one of these pictures operates in terms of color, composition or visual poetics.
In the mid 1980s, Simpson began working with interference paints, an acrylic coated in micro-particles of mica, which upon interacting with light, cause effects like the swirling spectrum of colors visible on the surfaces of oil puddles or soap bubbles.
By the time he was preparing to leave for Sacramento, he'd cast aside cubism to make straightforwardly expressionist landscapes—thickets of childlike brushstrokes that were skillful exercises in the standard Bay Area style of the period.
"[5] The survey book includes exhibition reviews from the Richmond Independent and the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as the transcription of a conversation between Simpson and the art critic Kenneth Baker.