Simon Fletcher

Simon Fletcher. Born Birmingham 1948

After completing his diploma in Fine Art at Farnham, Fletcher was employed as a draughtsman in a garden design company where he polished his drawing technique before devoting himself to painting.

Living in Oxford he began painting portraits and exhibited twice at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

He also made a series of etchings of Spanish landscapes during this period.

Moving to France in 1982 he began making contacts in Germany as well as France. A contemporary of German and Austrian painters such as G Salzmann, G Richter, R Fetting, Fletcher made a close study of the German  expressionist painters, many of whom worked in watercolour. 

As he began to exhibit, Fletcher's work entered major international collections such as The City of Sienna, The Sultanate of Oman, The Sultanate of AbuDhabi, The Hitachi Corporation, The City of Vienna, Oxford University, Bibliotheque National Paris.

He has published eight books about his work in English, French and German,

and has exhibited with many well known contemporaries both in England and Europe. For some years he had a residency in Ravello on the Amalfi coast of Italy and in 2016 a retrospective exhibition of his work was organised by the Modern Art Museum of Salerno and he published a new portfolio of prints, Ravello 5, in 2022.

A new book of paintings and drawings about the landscape of the Aude department of France, with texts by Rupert Wright, will be published in 2025

    Etaing 60 x 80 2024  mixed media on board

     Swimming Pool series 2023 mixed media on paper

    Sculpture study 12x17 mixed media on paper

   Swimming pool series I 38x28 mixed media on paper

    Collioure Hotel

     Blue water, 60x90, 2023 mixed media 

          Fine art colour prints in open editions are now available from Bridgeman Prints.uk and Meisterdrucke.uk

           Editioned prints are available from my Gallery, The Art Gallery 17, F34610 France                                                         No2 Farm North Menorca, etching. Edition of 10 on hand made paper £750. Plate size 20x30cm

           No3 Woman in the mirror, woodcut. Edition of 18 on hand made paper £600. Sycamore block

         Ravello 5 

                 A new suite of five prints of Ravello, Italy, in a limited edition of ten folios.

                Each print is signed, titled and numbered including the folio number.

                The  prints were made using the sugar lift etching technique on copper plates which were then                                photographed at high resolution and printed on Somerset cotton rag paper using Epson lightfast inks

                The folio costs 1500€ for the five prints and the folio itself is made from cotton rag 350gm paper

                This offer is limited to ten folios only. 

                To receive one please email Simon Fletcher at movingbrush@gmail.com

                Below is Ravello 5 No 4 

 My studio gallery is open for visitors by appointment 

Atelier Galerie ouvert sur RDV 

+33 623921960

Interview with the painter.  https://youtu.be/SOey3zIFHe8

Testimonials SEE WORKSHOPS

A permanent exhibition of work is on show at 

The Art Gallery17 .

movingbrush@gmail.com

Please contact me if you wish to visit the gallery.

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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 Simon's work sponsored by The Economist