Michael Mansoor, chairman of the ANSA Awards' Eminent Persons Panel, said that the project "might cause history books about the pre-Columbian past of the Americas to be radically rewritten". Simon was awarded Guyana's Golden Arrow of Achievement in 1998. In May 2012, he was awarded the Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence for his work as an artist and an archaeologist. Simon paints primarily with acrylics on canvas, twill fabric, or paper. He builds contrasts and depth into his paintings by applying thin layers of acrylic, one on top of the other, "very gently and very tediously". In the late 1990s he started to experiment with the use of gesso in order to create texture and three-dimensional patterns of relief in his paintings. Conceptually, Simon deploys an intuitive approach to his paintings. He often begins by deciding on a dominant colour for his work, "throw[ing] paint haphazardly" at the canvas, and then responding to "imagery [that] comes up". In 1994/5 Simon explained: "I have great faith in the subconscious. So I would let the paint remain on the canvas and look at it and gradually images come out and I would develop those images". According to Simon, his archaeological work had a profound effect on his artistic style. His research into prehistoric art in South America and Latin America encouraged him "to look inwards" and to become "much more confident in using [his] own private language" and in his explorations of Amerindian culture and mythologies. Simon's work is most well known for its explorations of Amerindian cultural traditions in Central and South America. Shamanism, in particular, is a recurrent theme in his work. Important too are his repeated engagements with Amerindian "timehri" - ancient petroglyphs (rock-carvings) that are found throughout Guyana. These Guyanese "timehri" have been the object of numerous archaeological studies (most notably by Denis Williams), but Simon suggests that in his artwork he tries to "decode" them in his own "particular way", asking himself "why they were written, and what they are trying to say". Environment is also a major, and related, theme in Simon's work. In an article on "Arts and the Environment" in "Stabroek News", Al Creighton described Simon as an artist who engaged with the environment in a particularly "profound" way, especially through his representations of "Arawak co-existence with the land and the water".