The French Impressionist painter Laurent Parcelier was born in the autumn of 1962 in Chamalières. From his childhood years Laurent was taken with drawing. At the school of art he especially liked working on landscapes from life, which set him quite apart from the other students. And on moving to Paris, he went on with painting and applied art, and at the same time began to earn a little on the side at the magazine "Triolo," for which he drew fantastical comics. This occupation brought Laurent a good deal of both pleasure and money. Carried away with devising comics, he even created several albums of his own, and also began to collaborate with many other publications.
Quite by chance he found himself at a street-painting competition, and... Laurent Parcelier won its first prize.
In those days he worked as an animator; he did not give up his main job, but he took his victory at the street competition very seriously — he remembered that the public had liked his works exceedingly. The victory in the competition spurred him on to a new creative experiment, and he decided to take part in an exhibition at the Salon des Beaux-Arts de Périgueux. And he did not miscalculate... At the exhibition the artist's works caused a furor — both the public and the critics were delighted.
From that time Parcelier began to take part in exhibitions regularly; the press wrote about the artist a great deal and well, and then invitations followed from abroad. And here the artist simply vanished, and for many years no one heard a thing of him.
When the artist appeared again in 1996, he caused an enormous sensation. With great delight his works were received by viewers at the most prestigious of exhibitions in Paris. As it turned out, the years during which the artist had "kept silent" had been spent on creating his own unique hand and style, belonging to contemporary Impressionism.
It was works like these by the artist that art historians and the public liked — bright, living landscapes, as though woven out of sunbeams, fragrant and warm, like the air of southern France. Parcelier's works stand out amid traditional French Impressionist painting. The viewer's eye is drawn by the graphic quality the artist gained during his time creating comics, and by the scrupulousness with which his pictures are built. There is in them a kind of framework, which keeps the color — conveyed through a multitude of soft touches — from getting lost in chaotic abstraction.
Laurent began to paint bright, living landscapes, as though spun out of dancing flecks of sunlight, warming with the last of the summer's warmth, steeped in the air of southern France. From that time Laurent Parcelier has been a constant participant in various shows both in France and abroad. The once inconspicuous street artist of Paris became a world-renowned and very popular master...
For Parcelier it is as though there exist no problems, no bad moods, and no gray sky overhead. On all his canvases there are depicted only lovely landscapes: cozy verandas, pots of flowers, graceful chairs, and white tablecloths. The canvases plunge the viewer into the heat of a pleasant summer's day. The author himself speaks of his works thus:
I like my paintings, they look real. People can recognize the place that is shown in them.
And even autumn, on the artist's canvases, is colorful, soft, and warm.
"It seems he lives on some other planet, where there is no sadness and no tears, where even autumn is bright and sunny, and the rain is merry and warm," wrote the artist Howard Behrens in the article "The Monet of the 21st Century."
The website of the dancing flecks of sunlight: Laurent Parcelier
Ave France