Art Gallery of Newfoundland and Labrador (AGNL) Shaped by the Sea Permanent Collections Anne Meredith Barry Peter Bell Sylvia Bendzsa David Blackwood Wally Brants Manfred Buchheit Scott Fillier Scott Goudie Pam Hall Tish Holland Josephina Kalleo Kathleen Knowling Frank Lapointe Ray Mackie Colin Macnee Stewart Montgomerie George Noseworthy Paul Parsons Artworks: Page #1 Helen Parsons Shepherd Rae Perlin Christopher Pratt Mary Pratt Barbara Pratt Wangersky William B. Ritchie Gary Saunders Reginald Shepherd Gerald Squires Janice Udell Arch Williams Don Wright

Paul Parsons Some artists find their way to art. Paul Parsons was born into it and for it. Born in 1925 in St. John's, Parsons began drawing at a very early age. Unlike many artists who have had to earn money with other jobs, Parsons has, with the exception of a brief period in the mid-1960s, always made his living from his art. Looking at his family, this talent for artistic expression seems almost inevitable. His father was well-known poet R.A. Parsons, and his sister Helen Parsons Shepherd is a distinguished portrait painter. Parsons is known for his watercolours and oil paintings, and has also been a poet for years. Foggy Morning 1970 Oil on Masonite 61 x 68.7 cm (29KB) From 1949 to 1956 Parsons studied at the Newfoundland Academy of Art, the first art school in Newfoundland, which was owned and operated by his sister Helen and her husband, artist Reginald Shepherd. He went on to study for a year at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, England. In the late 1960s, Parsons opened and ran the Art Shop Gallery and later the St. John's Art School. In the mid-1960s, he worked for the Newfoundland Government Planning Board and produced his well-loved illustrated map of Newfoundland. Parsons' artwork has been exhibited in commercial and public galleries, most notably in his solo show, Paul Parsons: A Retrospective, at Memorial University Art Gallery in 1983. He has won several awards in the provincial government's Arts and Letters Competition. While Parsons had used various media, in the 1980s he started working almost exclusively in watercolours on nature scenes and studies of people engaged in everyday activities, painted on the spot and often combined with appropriate poems. He is known for his romantic use of colour. But Parsons' art is best expressed in his own words, "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 per cent of it – the rest is spiritual" (The Newfoundland Herald, April 18, 1979). Paul Parsons continues to live and paint in Spaniards Bay, Newfoundland, during the summer and in St. John's in the winter.