What it’s actually like
Walk east along Main Street toward Scottsdale Road and the window at 7145 is full of color: flower markets, Monet’s garden, surf breaking on rocks, a Yosemite valley under cloud. Simic Galleries sells traditional fine art and makes no apology for it. Its founder, Mario B. Simic, was a painter who came to America in 1970, settled in Carmel and opened his first gallery there in 1980; the Scottsdale room carries the same taste east, and the gallery calls it the largest collection of traditional fine art in the area.
Inside, the emphasis is on range rather than a tight program — you come to browse. The core is European-trained painters working in the impressionist and realist traditions: Stojan Milanov’s market scenes and gardens, Stan Stolkov’s oils, Vasiljevic’s small still lifes, a desert piece or two by Valencia. Mario Simic’s own landscapes and seascapes hang throughout, many also available as giclées, and Katarina Simic’s oils carry the family name into the next generation.
It is a gallery for people who want a painting that looks like a painting, and the staff treat a first purchase with the same seriousness as a fifth. The gallery says its collectors number more than 27,000 around the world, which tells you how much of the business is repeat buyers.
What to buy
A Stojan Milanov. The market scenes and garden pieces are the gallery’s calling card, with the warmth of French impressionism and a Main Street price.
A Mario Simic coastal or Yosemite piece. The founder’s subjects, in oil or as giclées, and the most direct link to the Carmel gallery where it all began.
A small still life. The most affordable originals in the room, and easier to fit on a wall or in a suitcase.
A desert subject. Valencia’s Desert Cactus, featured in the 2026 district guide, is the house nod to where you are standing.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The gallery is on the south side of Main Street in the block just west of Scottsdale Road, a few doors east of Malee’s Thai Bistro and across from Waddell Gallery. The Legacy Gallery holds the corner to the east. Main Street parking is short-term and contested; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a flat five-minute walk east, and the Old Town on foot note maps the route. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the rest of the row.
Simic is open seven days — Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday from 11 a.m. — which makes it a reliable Sunday stop when some neighbors are closed. Thursday’s ArtWalk runs from 6 to 9 p.m. here, a little earlier than the street’s official hours. High season is January through April; in summer the gallery is cool, quiet and a good place for a long conversation about a single painting.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro is a few doors away for dinner. The Sugar Bowl is a block north on Scottsdale Road, pink since 1958; the Rusty Spur Saloon is across Scottsdale Road in a 1921 bank; and Los Olivos on Second Street has served Mexican food to the neighborhood since 1947.
How it got here
Mario Simic arrived in America in 1970 and found his subject on the Monterey Peninsula: the coastline at Carmel, a town that had been an artists’ colony since the early twentieth century and was by then one of the country’s great gallery towns for traditional painting. He painted it, sold it, and in 1980 opened a gallery of his own there. The Carmel gallery became a group, and over the following decades Simic galleries opened in other California resort towns where visitors stroll and buy — La Jolla, Rancho Santa Fe and Palm Desert among them.
Scottsdale was a natural next step. Main Street had been a gallery street since Troy’s Cowboy Art Gallery opened in 1968, the Thursday ArtWalk had run since 1975, and the winter crowd that walks Old Town is the same crowd that walks Carmel. Simic’s Scottsdale opening, in the early 2000s by the group’s own chronology, was an event: the actress and painter Jane Seymour was the honored guest, showing her own paintings in a one-woman exhibition.
The gallery has kept the formula that worked in Carmel. Where most of Main Street specializes — Western bronze at one door, Native American jewelry at the next, abstraction across the street at Gebert Contemporary — Simic offers traditional painting in breadth, from European impressionist scenes to the family’s own coastal work. Katarina Simic’s oils carry the family name on the walls as well.
Its neighbors on the block show what the street has become: T.H. Brennen Fine Art with its academic realists, The Signature Gallery with the Pabst family’s paintings, and Legacy on the corner with the Western heavyweights. Simic is the room where the Carmel coast meets the Sonoran Desert.