Simon Fletcher

Pieter et Catherine Burgers qui ont créé de Château de Lunas un lieu célèbre dans la région nord de Montpellier et Béziers, continuent  leur tradition de montrer l'art contemporain dans leur espace d'exposition avec une sélection de 45 des œuvres de Simon Fletcher datant des années 1980. Pieter et son frère, qui possède une galerie dans la Provence, partagent un intérêt dans la peinture contemporaine 

From now until October Pieter & Catherine Burgers are showing 45 works at their beautiful Château de Lunas. A selection of work from my studio includes early etchings, drawings and oils as well as some recent watercolours. Some works are for sale.

Please email me for more information about this and visits to our small gallery in St Gervais sur Mare

New work will be on show at The Art Gallery17 from May this year.

www.theartgallery17.com

The new year is starting with some new projects: a group of painters coming to Morocco, an exhibition at the Château de Lunas and up coming workshops in France and England. 

A program or workshops can be seen in the workshops section of this site

http://bridgeman-images.com/23OM-4ZP6K-52HD44LZ61/cr.aspx

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Getting inside the painter’s mind

Simon Fletcher is one of the best watercolour painters around. He has spent over 30 years refining his technique, which is a mile away from the British tradition, and closer to that of the Austrian and German expressionists, such as Emil Nolde, Oscar Kokoschka and Karl Schmitt-Rottluff.

When asked, out of the blue, two years ago to produce a mural covering 50 square metres of a wine estate building in southern France, Simon saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime to explore and explode the essence of the watercolourist’s art– literally by blowing up his work.

This is not as easy as it sounds. The essence of watercolour is the transparency of many pigments and the whiteness of the paper illuminating the image from inside. Blowing up a watercolour using traditional enlargement methods tends to reduce the illumination to an insipid greyness.

But with graphic techniques applied by his son Gerry, who works as a graphic designer at the BBC, the intensity of the paint stays the same regardless of the magnification. So the viewer is confronted, not by a sea of pixels, as in a Roy Lichtenstein classic, but by intense brushmarks and contrasts. It is if a giant hand using gallons of paint has been at work. You see the individual atoms of pigment mingled in organised fractal chaos.

For the first time, perhaps, the art of the watercolourist is revealed in amazing detail on the big screen.

Peter and Susan Close, who commissioned the work for Chateau Complazens, their winery near Narbonne, asked for an unusual mural. What they have ended up with is an extraordinary adventure into the possibilities that the digital age offers to watercolour.

The mural will be opened to the public on Saturday June 28^th. There is a special press opening on Friday July 4^th.

www.camplazens.com +33 (0) 468 453 889 

www.simonfletcher.org +33 (0) 467 236 528 +33 (0) 623921960

David Shirreff, formerly with The Economist helped to organise an exhibition of my work sponsored by The Economist