The work of a highly collectable North Yorkshire artist is to become accessible to a wider audience with the launch of his first selection of signed limited edition prints on-line.
Over the last four decades Simon Palmer has become one of Britain’s leading watercolour artists with his work selling mostly through prestigious galleries in London and attracting renowned collectors from around the world.
Demand for his art has prompted the creation of a new website from which collectors can purchase from an initial selection of 15 prints.
Other limited edition prints will be added at intervals in the future, each one usually limited to 100, titled and signed by the artist.
One work, Two Women of Integrity, is limited to 450 prints with all proceeds going to the Marie Collins Foundation, which was founded by Simon’s wife Tink Palmer MBE in 2011. Simon donated the proceeds of the original work to assist Tink in establishing the Masham-based charity, which supports children who have been sexually abused online.
Simon said: “Like other British artists before me, I draw a spiritual connection from the land in a specific place, offering my personal perspective on the narrow lanes, railway bridges, drystone walls and winding fencing, stone churches and farms, ancient trees, new saplings and distant moors of the Yorkshire Dales.
“I am thrilled to be able to share my work online and, for the first time, to be offering it for sale as limited edition prints, which I hope can be enjoyed by many more people.”
Simon was born in Yorkshire in 1956 but was brought up in Bromley, Kent, where his family moved when he was eight months old. He graduated from Reigate Art School in 1977.
In 1976 he spent a few days with friends in Lastingham, North Yorkshire, and fell in love with the landscape that has been his inspiration ever since. For the past 35 years he has lived and worked in Wensleydale.
He is considered to be a visionary painter, his connection with his much-loved home and the world of his imagination being unfettered by current trends and opinions as, from the apparently familiar, he creates illusions which hover on the brink of reality.
Simon has exhibited extensively and held ten one-man exhibitions in London with JHW Fine Art. Since 2015 he has exhibited bi-annually with the Portland gallery in conjunction with JHW Fine Art.
Other notable exhibitions include in 2004 a retrospective show ‘Territories of the Imagination’ at the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, and he later curated Palmer’s Choice at the same venue.
On a number of occasions his work has been selected for display at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition where he won the 2007 Turner/Winsor and Newton Watercolour award. Other notable exhibitions include the National Trust Centenary Exhibition, British landscape painting in the 20th Century.
