Art in Norfolk

Norfolk has the deepest visual-art culture in the East of England and, on our own listings, more working artists than any other county in the region. The Norwich School of Painters, John Crome and John Sell Cotman among them, made it a landmark in British landscape art two centuries ago, and the habit they set of looking hard at big skies, flat fields and shifting coastal light still runs through the county's work. Landscape remains the dominant subject here by a wider margin than anywhere else in the region.

The county has two centres rather than one. Norwich is the first: Norwich University of the Arts feeds the city a steady supply of graduates, the Sainsbury Centre and Norwich Castle anchor the collections, and OUTPOST, artist-run with its own studio block, has held the contemporary end together for years. The second is the north coast, where Holt, Cley, Wells-next-the-Sea, Cromer and Burnham Overy Staithe form the densest concentration of coastal and marine painters in the region, marsh and shingle and weather doing the work that the Broads do inland. Both the East Anglia Art Fund and the Holt Art Awards operate from this part of the county, and the open studios networks run through the summer across Norfolk and Breckland.

Where to see it: the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Mandell's Gallery and OUTPOST in Norwich, Bircham Gallery in Holt, GroundWork Gallery and Contemporary and Country at King's Lynn, and Houghton Hall.