October 27, 2018, a new exhibit featuring Simpkins’ detailed and colorful paintings opened at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon and was on display through February 17, 2019.

Former Curator of Arts and Community Engagement, Andries Fourie, had this to say about the exhibit:

“John Simpkins personifies the tradition of the artist as a mystic and hermit. For the past seven years, he’s lived and painted in the schoolhouse in Andrews, a ghost town nestled between Steens Mountain and the Alvord Desert…

How did I get here to the old Andrews Schoolhouse? Well, it’s a bit of a story… We’ll have to travel back in time a bit here.

First, my trip to Tibet in 2003… While hiking to the high overlook at Lhama Lhatso—elevation 14,800 feet—I asked the sky, the Cosmos, “if ever there is a place like this (but closer to Costco!) please, I would like to live there someday”.

“MY LIFE IS LIKE A DREAM,” John Simpkins has said of his isolated existence in the ghost town of Andrews, Oregon, in the most southeasterly corner of Harney County. He lives there with his poodle, Phoebe, in an abandoned teacherage and works in the old stone schoolhouse, a good three hundred miles round-trip from the nearest grocery store. The closest community is Fields, population eight.