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Paul Parsons To create something is just expressing the fact that you are alive. Art is a spiritual thing. It's the expression of a human being. I think a human being is like an iceberg. The physical you see is only ten percent of it the rest is spiritual. From The Newfoundland Herald, April 18, 1979, p.39. Paul Parsons was born in St. John's, Newfoundland, in 1925. Parsons' father was poet R.A. Parsons, and his sister, Helen Parsons Shepherd, is a distinguished portrait painter. Parsons has become well-known for his watercolours and oil paintings, as well as for his poetry. From 1949-56, Parsons attended the Newfoundland Academy of Art, the first art school in Newfoundland. It was owned and operated by his sister Helen and her husband, Reginald Shepherd. Parsons then moved to London, England, where he studied for a year at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. On his return to Newfoundland, in the mid-1960s, he worked for the Newfoundland Government Planning Board and produced his well-loved, illustrated map of Newfoundland. During the late 1960s, Parsons opened the Art Shop Gallery and later established the St. John's Art School.
Parsons experimented with various media, but in the 1980s he began to focus exclusively on watercolours of nature scenes and studies of people engaged in everyday activities, usually painted on location and often combined with his poetry. His work has been exhibited in commercial and public galleries, including the exhibition Paul Parsons: A Retrospective, organized by Memorial University Art Gallery in 1983. His work has been repeatedly recognized by the annual provincial Arts and Letters Competition. Parsons' artwork is part of private and public collections including that of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. He continues to live and paint in Spaniards Bay, Newfoundland, during the summer months and in St. John's during the winter.
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