Simon Palmer: Images of Landscape

19th March - 5th May

Simon Palmer, one of the UK’s most highly regarded watercolour artists, has lived and worked in Wensleydale for the last forty years. This Spring, The Garden Rooms at Tennants is delighted to present a solo selling exhibition of limited edition prints of some of his most admired works created between 1993 and 2021, inspired by the landscape of Wensleydale and surrounding areas.

Simon is deeply rooted in the landscape of his home, a connection that shines through in his work. He captures the essence of the area with his distinctive style, that combines a rich yet harmonious colour palette, intricate tones and textures, and a dreamlike quality that is very much continuing the tradition of the great Post-War British landscape artists such as John and Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and Graham Sutherland.

Simon creates his watercolours in his studio, working from quick sketches executed en plein air, which are then translated through his memory. Rather than observing the landscape impassively from a high viewpoint, Simon’s pictures put the viewer into the rural, agricultural landscape richly layered with both the natural and the man-made; winding lanes, verges, curving hedges and linear fences, trees wreathed with ivy and billowing foliage, signposts and barns, railway bridges and rolling fields. This set of prints is an artist’s highly personal response to a much-loved landscape, but whilst the landscapes seem very familiar, Simon invites the viewer to look anew and observe more closely the world around us.

About the artist

Simon Palmer (b. 1956), born in Yorkshire, has exhibited extensively since 1980, having graduated from art school in 1977. During an illustrious career, he has held ten solo exhibitions with JHW Fine Art in London, and since 2015 has been represented by Portland Gallery, London, in co-operation with JHW Fine Art.

Further accolades include a retrospective, Territories of the Imagination, held in 2004 at the Mercer Gallery, Harrogate, receiving the Turner/Winsor & Newton Watercolour Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2007, being made an honorary member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, and appointed to the position of Visiting Professor in Fine Art at the University of Suffolk in 2016. Simon has also exhibited with the National Trust, Crane Kalman Gallery, Bohun Gallery, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and Glyndebourne, and his work is held in numerous public and private collections around the world.

Opening hours

Monday - Friday 8.30am-5pm

Saturday 9am-5pm

Sunday 9am-4pm

All the giclée prints in the exhibition will be for sale from Garden Reception and are from a limited edition run of 100.