KUNSTHUIS Gallery, at Dutch House, Crayke, presents boundary-pushing artists who demonstrate a fresh and exciting approach to watercolour painting in A Wash Of Energy from tomorrow to October 29.

"We want to celebrate excellence and originality within this medium," says curator Cecile Creemers. "Kunsthius Gallery has engaged in extensive research of artists who work within the medium of watercolour and who, we believe, sit in line with our gallery's ethos to be the contemporary abstract gallery of the north."

On show will be watercolourists James Faure Walker, Carol Robertson, Ruth Piper, Ruth McCabe, Helen Wells and Rachel Sudworth, complemented by ceramics by Aphra O'Connor and Richard Smith and sculpture in wood, found objects, metal and stone by Birgit Toke Tauka Frietman, Jim Murdoch, Patrick Walls, Rebecca Lisle and Sara Jane Palmer.

Winner of the Royal Watercolour Society Award, James Faure Walker studied at St Martins and the Royal College of Art and was a founder of Artscribe in 1976, editing the magazine for eight years. Noted for his work's lyricism and exuberant colour, he won the Golden Plotter prize at Computerkunst, Gladbeck, Germany, in 1998 and was one of five English artists commissioned to produce a print for the 2010 South African World Cup.

London artist Carol Robertson, winner of the Singer & Friedlander/Sunday Times Watercolour competition in 2005, works within the tradition of geometric abstraction. She is known for her luminous striped and circle formations that do not seek to record the world as it looks, but nevertheless are linked closely to everyday life: to things seen, felt and imagined.

Ruth Piper is influenced by the terrain and atmosphere of dark literature and films, with a special fascination for westerns and psychological thrillers. She is interested in both the transitional mythological landscape between knowing and the unconscious, where dreams and reality merge, and the notions of transition and transformation that link to a strong sense of place, whether physical or psychological.

York Press:

Drifter, in Ancaster Weatherbed, by Patrick Walls

Helen Wells combines media such as ink, watercolour paint and paper to create fascinating artworks that celebrate the joyful side of life and allude to infinite possibilities. In 2014 she jointly won Winsor & Newton’s Watercolour Revolution competition, resulting in her painting being displayed in the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Inspired by quiet, still places, Rachel Sudworth uses subtle colours found in wild environments. She loves hills, mountains and forests, empty winter beaches and northern light.

Ruth McCabe draws inspiration from forms in the landscape, be they the coastal Suffolk where she lives or her old haunts of Ingleton Gorge, Snowdonia and the North York Moors from her undergraduate field-course days. “I sketch and paint on site, en plein air, but use these compositions only as stimulations for studio-worked pieces," she says.

Ruth was a finalist and exhibitor in the Sunday Times Contemporary Watercolour Competition at the Mall Galleries, London, and a competitor in the 2016 Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year.

Kunsthuis Gallery will hold a Prosecco Sunday Afternoon of Art and (hopefully) Sunshine this weekend from 1pm to 3pm to mark the opening of this late-summer and autumn exhibition.

A Wash Of Energy will run at Kunsthuis Gallery, Dutch House, Mill Green Farm, Crayke, near York, from tomorrow (August 25) to October 29, open Wednesday to Sunday, 11am to 4pm.