Landscapes are a little surreal

Next April will be a landmark in the career of Yorkshire-based print-maker and landscape watercolourist Simon Palmer.

Thirty-five years ago, The Dalesman magazine published one of his paintings on its cover. The Bridge at Lastingham, painted the previous year while a 19-year-old art student, came out of a holiday with friends on the North Yorkshire Moors at Lastingham.

In advance of this anniversary, a large format hardback book with 115 colour pictures charts and illustrates Simon’s career as a professional artist. “What interests him most is not untamed nature and transient side effects,” writes Elspeth Moncrieff, “but man’s intervention on the land and the way it creates surface, pattern and texture and gives form to a composition.

“He is no Turner, depicting man as crushed and awed by the elements, nor is there an agenda, a concern for the preservation of rural England. In his world, man and nature exist in harmony.” A somewhat surreal harmony, it may be said.

Unlike David Hockney’s East Yorkshire landscapes, which contain no human beings, the elongated figures that appear in some of Simon’s pictures vanish into fissures in the earth or appear to be looking for something lost in fields or long and winding country roads.

“Because a painting is by Simon Palmer, there is a perception that something strange should be about to happen, that there must be some hidden meaning.

“He is, however, first and foremost a landscape painter and never tires of his subject. Simon is often painting nature for the sheer joy of it, with no hidden agenda, no nymphs, nor angels lurking in the thickets...He loves nothing more than to chronicle the land as it passes through the seasons,” Elspeth adds.

She could hardly have chosen a better time to chronicle Simon Palmer’s life and work, for next year also marks the 25th anniversary of the opening of the 1853 Hockney Gallery at Salts Mill by the late Jonathan Silver.

The Bradford-born entrepreneur intended the gallery space to be devoted exclusively to the works of his friend and mentor David Hockney; but so impressed was he by Simon’s skill that he invited him to Saltaire and commissioned a series of large paintings for the mill. Other commissions followed.

Two of the best-known of this series shows Titus Salt on the bank of the Leeds-Liverpool canal, examining a huge fob watch, as though late for the Mad Hatter’s tea party, and Saltaire people hurrying down to the chapel in the village to attend the old man’s funeral. To strike a contemporary note, in the foreground are David Hockney’s two dachshounds, Stanley and Boodge.

For those more familiar with the Ashley Jackson style of landscape – moody moorland vistas swept by rain or bundled up under a pile of snow – Simon’s tree-dominated landscapes, usually depicted from above eye-level, will come as a surprise.

In colour and detail they appear to be representational; but, as this book shows, there is more to his pictures than that. In spite of what Eslpeth says – Simon has no agenda – pictures with titles such as Pandora’s Box and A Moment Before The Annunciation evoke more complex feelings other than a bucholic appreciation of nature.

He says his pictures exist between the two force fields of religious belief and agnosticism. The coated figures, some holding suitcases, are not representative of the countryfolk of Wensleydale, where Simon lives, but of another landscape in his imagination.

In pictures such as Delivering Some Relatively Good News and The Last Owner Of The Gothic Aqueduct, there is an element of fable or fairytale.