Watercolour Now

Watercolour Now explores the distinctive qualities of painting in watercolour. Selected by the artist Simon Carter, the exhibition brings together an exciting range of contemporary approaches to watercolour in the Timothy Gurney Gallery at Norwich Castle. The eight artists featured share a fascination with how watercolour can capture diverse and often fleeting relationships with light, colour, landscape and history.

Watercolour is made up of pigment bound in tree gum and dissolved in water. It is a particularly versatile medium and has a long history of being used in different ways. As many of the works on display in the exhibition demonstrate, its transparency often exposes the paper ground and the artist’s handling of the brush. These traces of process give the paintings a sense of immediacy that is pulled in different directions, as the artists experiment with new ideas and ways of working.

The exhibiting artists are Simon Carter, Christoper Le Brun, Alf Löhr, Barbara Nicholls, Melanie Russell, Mark Stewart, Charlotte Verity and James Faure Walker.

As part of the exhibition, the artists selected works from Norfolk Museums Service’s historical collections that they felt resonated with their own approaches to watercolour. We are displaying these paintings, which are mostly from the nineteenth century, in the Colman Watercolour Gallery at Norwich Castle.

Image credit: Simon Carter, Song of the Marsh Birds, 2025, watercolour on paper. Image courtesy of the artist. Copyright Simon Carter.

Exhibition included in general admission. Prices from £15.30 for adults when booked online, in advance.