Hans Parlevliet's paintings are characterized by his pure use of the brush. He mainly paints landscapes with a horizon that seems to reach to infinity, something that is so characteristic of the Northern Dutch landscape. The compositions excel in their fresh, clear colors and clean lines. The paintings by Hans Parlevliet give the viewer the impression of ‘stepping into’: the painting: the most prominent elements come so close that you almost want to touch them.
 
Groningen illustrator
Hans Parlevliet was born in Groningen in 1953 and later visited the Academy Minerva in that same city, where he graduated in 1980 in free painting. After completing his education, he mainly occupied himself with commissioning illustrations in the 1980s. He did this in a partnership with fellow student Herman Tulp, another painter who now exhibits at gallery Wildevuur. The duo of painters proved to be a successful combination and for many years participated in the illustrators' top of the Netherlands. From the beginning of the nineties, Hans Parlevliet started to take up his painting brush more and more, because there was increasing demand for his paintings.

Recognizable imagination
The quiet glory of the Northern Netherlands landscape plays a central role in the works of Hans Parlevliet. A vast horizon reaching to the horizon, meadows, fields and water, with here and there a tree, flowering wild flowers or a lonely bridge, leading over a canal. In the early landscape paintings by Hans Parlevliet you saw a cow walking around regularly, but in his most recent works the emptiness prevails. There is often a soft, misty hint over his landscapes. And because certain details, such as a turret on an island or a village on the other side of the canal, are dreamlike silhouetted against the endless horizon, Hans Parlevliet's paintings sometimes look almost like illustrations from a story. The composition of each painting is a work of art in itself: each line is carefully weighed before the first brush stroke is placed on the panel.


Although the landscape details of Hans Parlevliet evoke recognisability in us, they have largely sprouted from the imagination of the artist. Certain elements have been taken from their original context, moved elsewhere or put in a different perspective, so that the result is a reflection of the inner eye of the painter. A characteristic aspect of every painting is light, which often shines from the unexpectedly on the depicted scene. A touch of humor, this Groningen painter is not strange either: sometimes he places a small picture joke somewhere in his painting for the attentive spectator.

At gallery Wildevuur you can view an exhibition of the landscapes of Hans Parlevliet that appeal to the imagination from 2 March to 22 April, during the exhibition Still Waters, Running Deep.

More about the colorful realism of Hans Parlevliet can be found on his website.