Welcome to my website.
Click on the menu bar at top for paintings, books, biography & more
New Paintings, workshops, books and exhibitions can all be investigated on this site. Click on workshops for our dates in 2015
In the gallery you will find a selection of watercolours, drawings and pastels. Landscapes, still life, portraits and ceramics are all there and the page will be updated regularly with new works.
2015 CALENDAR - SOLD OUT
NEW BOOK, PASTEL PRAXIS auf Deutsch jezt ereichbar!
A small selection of work is on view at our local art space/restaurant, L'Ortensia, St Gervais sur Mare until end March.
www.restaurant-ortensia.com
From 15 04 until 02 05 2015 Recent work at Galerie Marianne, Agelés-sur-mer. Two demonstrations of watercolour technique, 18 04 & 02 05. More information at http://ville.argeles-sur-mer.com/f
Brioude biennale de l'aquarelle 2015
www.biennale-aquarelle.com
Through July until early August, Moroccan paintings and other recent work at SILK Gallery, Domain St Hilaire, Montagnac, France
thesilkgallery.fr/
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 28th. There is a special press opening on Friday July 4th.
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
Travel and work
For years now I've travelled to learn from other painters and places and have been lucky to know some of the truly great painters as well as having the huge pleasure of discovering new places and cultures.
I was invited to write my first book in 1994 and this gave me the opportunity of sharing my pleasure and excitement in some ground breaking painters as well as writing about the new and better paints that have become available over the past thirty years.
Since then I've gone on to write ten books mostly about my own work in watercolour and pastel. Some are still available and you can find a bibliography under the books heading with a short description of each book and how to order them.
"Surely one of the greatest living watercolour painters" R Muller Mehlis writing in The Munchener Mercure
"Simon Fletcher has reinvented pastel painting" Professor W Rupen, Sion, Switzerland
From September I will be represented by Bridgeman Studio who will handle all my work for reproduction purposes. Calendars, cards, posters or reproductions for books, magazines etc. are all managed by Bridgeman who are highly regarded for their services to publishing.
www.bridgemanimages.com/studio
