SIMON PALMER is one of Britain’s leading artists working in the traditional medium of watercolour. His work has been shown across the UK since the late 1970s. Since 1995, he has held biennial exhibitions with JHW Fine Art, and since 2015 at Portland Gallery, London, who represent the artist in association with JHW Fine Art.
He was born in south Yorkshire in 1956. He relocated to the Yorkshire Dales in 1977, and began to exhibit soon afterwards. His unmistakeable compositions both reflect and explore the corner of North Yorkshire where he has lived and worked for the last 40 years. From the early 1990s, Palmer has avoided group shows, preferring to produce and present a large body of connected work, settling into a pattern of a solo exhibitions (with accompanying catalogue) every two years.
In 2004, the retrospective Territories of the Imagination was held at the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, and the artist turned curator for the show Palmer’s Choice at the same venue. Palmer has shown work on several occasions at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, where he won the 2007 Turner/Winsor & Newton watercolour award. His work was included in the National Trust centenary exhibition, British landscape painting in the twentieth century at Crane Kalman Gallery, Art & Yorkshire: Turner to Hockney at Mercer Art Gallery; and Glyndebourne Festival Opera exhibition. He is an Honorary Member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours.
The Art of Simon Palmer was published in 2011, with an extended text by Elspeth Moncrieff. Simon Palmer has written and illustrated several books: among these are the verse tale Pebbles on a Beach, published as a limited edition in 1990, and two guidebooks to Saltaire. Palmer’s work is held in private collections in Europe, America, Australia and Japan. Salts Mill holds a collection of his work
