ARTIST STATEMENT
by Scott Fraser

There are many artists and genres that interest me and have influenced my progression as an artist, and I appreciate both historical and contemporary works. Van Eyke, Vermeer and Vander Wyden share the list with Lucien Freud, Joseph Cornell, Paul Klee and Frank Auerbach. I am particularly attached to the London school along with a group of contemporary Spanish realists. Of these, Lopez Garcia and Isabella Quintanilla impress me the most.

I have had an interest in painting since I was a young boy and my parents, who have always been very supportive, framed a small painting of roses that I did at age 3. It now hangs in my studio as a reminder of my early aspirations. I remember going to the Chicago Art Institute frequently as a boy, especially enjoying the works of Picasso. I went off to art school at the Kansas City Art Institute which was also pivotal. There they set me free to experiment with concept in a rich, dynamic environment. After leaving KCAI, I started out slowly, painting, learning and finally selling my work. This took a number of years. At age 27 I went away to Europe which turned out to be one of the most influential periods in my life. At this time, I had the opportunity to view first hand the artwork that I had previously only been able to admire in books. The Flemish artists spoke to me, especially Vermeer and his Woman Pouring Milk. Seeing this work altered my path as a realist painter, and was a catalyst for me changing from the figure and landscape to still life. Van Eykes alter piece in Ghent, made a lasting impression, and I was greatly inspired by a small work by Gerard Terborsh titled Gallant Conversation. I also had the good fortune to be able to see a Francis Bacon show at the Tate Gallery, and Las Meninas at the Prado, both of which I will never forget. It was during this time that I developed a more personal narrative style which found a voice in Still Life painting. I am still growing and developing this voice, and am never at a loss for what to paint next since the possibilities within the genre are endless.

The contemporary art world is not a place where a person can sit back and get too comfortable and I try not to confuse myself with all the isms that pop up in art. I am constantly looking to expand my knowledge, vision and expertise, and I feel most comfortable when I can experiment with imagery that is outside the box. I find I learn more with my larger work, so I try to take on one or two large projects a year that I can really sink my teeth into.

I certainly have been influenced by teachers, friends and art history. I also think it is easy to get too heavy and serious about art, so I havent followed any one school of thought. My paintings are very personal, with one work often evolving from another in a series of cycles. Much of my imagery is inspired by my surroundings, my background and family. My children have been a huge and ongoing inspiration for me, not just by way of the objects that have been incorporated into my paintings, but in the mind set they have shared with me. It is their honest interpretation and unaffected exploration of the natural world that has really opened my eyes and that I have tried to apply in my own work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

COPPER PAINTINGS
by Scott Fraser

Rembrandt, Gerard Terboursch, Breugel and Lucian Freud are among some of the more well-known artists who have chosen to paint on copper plates. Why copper? For some chemical reason, when properly prepped, paint flows beautifully on the surface of copper. It seems like the paint is literally sucked off my brush which allows for incredible detail. I am not sure when it all started, but I know that many icons were painted on copper, so the practice is very old. These have held up remarkably well over time. The combination of oil paint on copper is very stable and durable which are important characteristics of preservation. I had a student give me a few cast off panels to try. They sat in my studio for many years before I experimented with them, but once I finally figured out how to prep them satisfactorily, I was hooked. I usually work on a very small scale when I paint on copper, sometimes as small as 2 x 3 inches. This requires a tremendous amount of concentration, which is hard on my eyes and neck. I use a magnifying glass for both my subject matter and my painting and find it really helpful when working with the minute details this work requires.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DRAWING IS MY BEDROCK
by Scott Fraser

Drawing is my bedrock as an artist. All my work is built around it. I begin most of my paintings as a small thumbnail sketch, to see if the concept will work. Also, I often use drawings as pr-studies for paintings. In figuring line, volume and perspective, I do lots of adjusting in the stage before transferring the drawing to a panel for my painting. I rarely do a large work without extensive pre-study work. I love to look at drawings by other artists because it gives me a sense of being able to see into the way they think and to understand the underlying mechanics of their work. I especially enjoy the drawings of Rembrandt, Degas, Eakins, Giacometti and Lopez Garcia. In addition to pre-study drawings, I have included some figure drawings on this page. For many years I have been part of a figure drawing group that meets weekly. The anatomy of the human figure is one of the most challenging things to draw, and the skills learned from this carry over into my other work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PUSH PINS AND PAPER PLANES: A MID-CAREER SKETCH
by William Napier

Catalog essay
Solo show, Frye Art Museum, Seattle WA May 7 - August 8, 2004

It is late morning in Longmont, Colorado. In a tree shaded neighborhood of comfortable old homes that gives blessedly few hints of the surrounding region's headlong sprawl, a fortyish man sits alone in a high-ceilinged, white room. Of all the daylight hours that permit him to work, the two before noon are perhaps his favorite. Dependable, unsentimental north light falls upon a painting easel and a table just to its left. Upon that table, a meticulous arrangement of things that not one person in a hundred would label "objects d'art" With a student grade, number 1 synthetic brush poised in his hand, he concentrates his considerable powers of observation upon one of the items on that table, a small rectangular block of Styrofoam. Styrofoam! How various and strange still life painting has become since the sumptuously laden tables of the 17th century Dutch painters Kalf and Hecla. Of such improba­ble things do the Muses sing to one of the more prominent practitioners of Contemporary Realism. A partial but represen­tative sampling of this painter's inventory of precious miscellany might include paper cups, plates, and bags, odd bits of string, masking tape, bubblewrap, carpenter's rule, animal crackers, dried fish, sheet music, butterflies, beetles, birds' nests, and bones.

Assuming something of an actuarial role, I'd put Scott Fraser's painting career in its middle years. I have been acquainted with him personally and with his painting for roughly half of his working career. One of the first pieces of his that I remember seeing was something of an anomaly in a 1990 show com­memorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Rocky Mountain National Park. Virtually every other painting in that exhibit was a landscape extolling the glories of alpine scenery in more or less predictable, representational styles, Fraser's contribution was a small still life of a rock filled Mason jar seen against a paper file folder labeled, "Rocks/Glacier Creek." In the first mo­ments of my encounter with his encapsulated granite gems, I knew that I had come across an artist whose technical skill and aesthetic sensibility set him well apart from the marching ortho­doxies of realism. Here was a young talent who knew how to approach ideas obliquely, whose metaphorical slant and icono­graphic choices spoke of seriousness and play in equal measure, who was willing to make his audience work that little bit harder for the full pleasures to be found in his imagery. While Fraser has never indulged in deliberate difficulty, there are asso­ciations and symbols that elude a casual perusal of his work.

You will be forgiven if at first you are dazzled by sheer tech­nique, or even for blurting out the cliché´ that his paintings look so real that they might almost be photographs. And too, it is true that the whimsical charm and humor of many of his pieces cannot and should not be denied. But really, if he or any artist of his caliber is to be given his due, the public must commit themselves to the truly hard work that critical seeing entails. Fraser is, in fact, an artist of such real quality that he deserves to be liberated from the typical hyperbole of com­mercial promotion.

In recent years observers of the art scene have often been heard to declare that Realism is back, indeed that "beauty is back." Frequently the tone of these declarations implies that we are witnessing some rightful reinstatement a return to san­ity after decades of anarchistic experimentation. My conversa­tions with Scott Fraser over the years tell me that he is most definitely not among those who believe that everything be­tween the Armory Show and Photo Realism was an aberra­tion. I have seen him light up in the presence of experimental contemporary work, and conversely, have watched him stroll by walls hung with familiar "masters" with scarcely a turn of the head. When he speaks of an enthusiasm for the abstract, for a Kline or a Klee, he really means it, whereas I am convinced that many of today's Realists give lip service to the principles of abstraction only to ingratiate the critical and institutional fraternity who have yet to accord their brand of Realism full citizenship in the world of "serious art" Fraser's work separates itself from much New Realist painting in that it is not a calcu­lated reach for the attention of this heel-dragging contingent Much of Contemporary Realism's imagery has a competitive feel to it a typically American "anything you can do, I can do better" assertiveness, a Vegas-like predilection for spectacle. Because Fraser's work most often rests upon emotional and experiential bedrock, because his underlying ideas are lived and felt more than they are the contrivances of detached intellect, his work gains a visible authenticity that stands a greater chance of surviving time's winnowing evaluations. At the core of his best work, both somber and whimsically playful, is his abiding love of home and family. His is a quiet and focused life that has discovered great treasure in the dailiness of domestic routine. The discoveries and observations of his two growing children especially have profoundly expanded his creative horizons. For a painter who has realized no small degree of success, Fraser is a disarmingly humble and candid man. Face- to-face with the praise that routinely comes his way, he is self- effacing almost to a fault. But it would be a mistake to imagine an isolate innocently daubing away in the provinces. He has plotted the strategies of career building with great care, and is very keenly aware of what is happening on the national scene. And though his work has gained national prominence, he assiduously avoids the seductions of anything that would divert him down the path of celebrity. He is very happy, thank you, to be earning a good living and practicing his craft a level or two below the radar, so to speak, avoiding the capricious ap­petites that rave for a name one season, and spit it out the next. He and other talented Realists have found a network of museums and galleries that give every indication that they will be committed advocates of this new breed of painters for the long haul. The Butler Institute of American Art, the Flint Institute of Arts, the Evansville Museum of Arts and Science, The Philbrook Museum of Art, the Frye Art Museum, and a growing number of other commercial and public institutions nationwide are building the foundations of what many of us hope will be a recognition on the highest level for this mar­velously talented generation of Realists. High on anyone's list of key figures will be this Colorado painter of push pins and paper planes whose superbly crafted and inventive works grace the wails of this retrospective exhibition. I have long felt that these two recurrent subjects in Fraser's oeuvre neatly symbolize the virtues of his paintings: the aluminum push pin's elegant form and precision point and the folded paper plane's evocation of the artist's lights of imagination. In the morning light of his white room, Fraser's eye and hand pin down an idea, and his mind sends it soaring.

William Napier
Painter; Photographer, Writer

SCOTT FRASER: METAPHOR ILLUSION and REALITY
by Marilynne Mason

Catalog essay
One Man Exhibition
The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK, January 18 1998 - March 15 1998
Evansville Museum of Arts and Science, Evansville, IN, April 12 1998 - June 14 1998

Moving in and out of fashion over the course of the 20th century, realism in painting has never completely disappeared. So it came as no surprise when the prestigious magazine, ARTnews (February, 1997), proclaimed it hip once more. But anyone who has bothered to follow all the "isms" of contemporary art knows that there are some artists whose work is impervious to art trends. All of those silly pronounce­ments--abstraction is in, realism out and vice versa--seem particularly obtuse in the face of any real (and therefore, lively) work of art.

Today, a variety of realist styles compete for attention—photo-realism, trompe l'oeil, hard-edge, neo-realism, hyper-realism, and so on--and they all have something different to say about the appearance of reality. Realism is sometimes said to celebrate the material world, and yet light, color, and metaphorical relationships of objects in a painting may point to meaning that moves beyond a simple reflection of the world as we see it. Universal significance can and does arise out of the highly personal choice of objects in such work.

The work of painter Scott Fraser is clearly linked to so-called "new realism" in his clean lines, precision technique, and strong compositions. But unlike new realism, which is sometimes identified with a cool, detached, even antiseptic view of reality, Fraser's work is brimming with humor, mystery and layers of meaning, all exquisitely realized in oil paint. And Fraser's universe, filled as it is with secret significance, is more open to interpretation.

Take his painting of a dilapidated old chair covered in rose brocade, "Three Fishermen." Above the chair is a painting of three fishermen in a tempest-tossed boat. Beside the chair is a broom. In front of it are a length of electric cord and a battered running shoe. The armchair itself holds a stuffed fish. The obvious joke--the placement of the fish corre­sponds humorously to the efforts of the three fishermen in the painting within-the-painting-- does not detract from the very serious serenity of the piece. The colors are rich and warm, the light dramatic and beauti­ful, and the handling of paint classically elegant.

The fact that the armchair belonged to Fraser's grandparents, the stuffed fish was his father's trophy, and the shoe is his own, makes this a kind of still life family portrait. Yet, it is far from sentimental. The wit, the combination of these particular, unglamorous and unidealized objects, and especially the somber hues of the piece give the painting strength. And somehow the composition, neat as a pin, yet surprising, speaks of genuine feeling rather than the cheap exploitation of emotion which defines sentimentality. In fact, Fraser eschews sentimentality, and the piece is almost solemn in its formal dignity. The painterly approach to light as it glances off the wall and the floor recalls Old Masters' preoc­cupation with light. Fraser's subtle twist of humor and the casual incon­gruity of the objects, though, assure the viewer that something unusual is going on. We know there is more here to discover, more to explore.

And that "something more" begins with a trace element of surrealism.

"A lot of different concepts [come from) dreams," says Fraser. "Sometimes I dream about my childhood. The fish and the chair piece came from such a dream. When my parents would visit my grandpar­ents' house in Chicago and stay late, I would always fall asleep in that chair, so it has comforting memories. I could curl up in it, and I remember falling asleep in it many times, and they would pick me up and put me in the car for the long ride home. This painting of the fish­ermen used to hang over the chair, and I would look up from a groggy sleep and wonder what they were catching in the dark sea at night."

The meticulous reproduction of the chair, which is beginning to deteriorate, preserves it, gives it further life--a recurring theme through­out Fraser's career. It has a poetic metaphorical function, and thinking about the metaphors of Fraser's work is one of the great pleasures of viewing it. He likes to paint still life--to paint from life, as he puts it. And the objects he chooses (rocks, feathers, fruit, paper, eggs, tools, his son's shoes, bird skeletons, etc.) bring into the interior of his studio the outdoors, as well as his own childhood memories and the favored belongings of people he loves. He won't be pinned down too closely about the meaning of these objects, because he wants to leave room for the viewer's own interpretation.

One of his most evocative, profound pieces of the last two years is "Life Cycle." Two small bird skeletons and a ragged nest containing two appar­ently living eggs form a classic triangle. It is a very serious piece, express­ing as it does the terrible sorrows of the flesh: "All flesh is as grass."

Yet various elements of this painting reassure us of the ongoingness of life. There is a subtlety in the placement of the skeletal birds. One bird's posture reminds us of nesting, the other's reminds us of flight, But the living, white eggs tinged with warmth, the loving, perfect reconstruction in paint of the nest and the skeletons, even the debris (flakes of wood or dirt that might have fallen from the nest as it was placed), and the pale ground, which is warmed by delicate color, help invest this piece with a lively presence. "There's the promise of life beginning," Fraser says, and, indeed, eggs symbolize resurrection and rebirth in a variety of religious traditions. The painting is actually uplifting. In fact, we are acutely aware that Fraser has rescued the bones from oblivion and given these once living creatures further life. There is a restoration going on here as surely as there is a mystery.

The, quirky mysteries in so many (though not all) of Fraser's paintings open the windows of the imagination. His restrained use of private sym­bols never seems esoteric or exclusionary—it's always clear that he wants us to solve the puzzle, or at least feel that everything fits together. Take "Thin Fragile Line." One of his most startling paintings, it presents a human skull propped up in a cardboard box with bubble wrap. A deck of cards topped by a clear glass marble lies to the right, a joker from the deck mocks us slyly on the left. The box itself forms a cross—an ancient symbol of suffering and also of protection and hope.

It doesn't take much guessing to sense that the piece is about the fragility of human life, the force of time, the workings of chance. What isn't instantly clear is that the painter's wife had been through a difficult illness, having had a benign tumor (the size of the glass marble) removed from her brain. Fraser's impulse was to protect her, and his imagination seized on these images to articulate his overwhelming desire to cradle her head from harm. The skull here does not symbolize death as one might first suppose.

Fraser is emphatically not a photo-realist. The exact replication of the real does not look like a photograph. The human eye, to say nothing of the human brain, is far more sensitive to light and volume than is the lens of the camera and Fraser wants no false eye or slick paper coming between him and the objects he paints.

The serene surfaces of his paintings often belie the strong issues of life that Fraser takes up. Incongruities and odd juxtapositions make eccen­tric dances across his paintings: Dried smelt "swim" on a torn sheet of ruled notebook paper while little goldfish crackers school in the other direction; a magnificent, enormous beetle poses on a brilliant blue ground, and a cracker stands in for the moon; butterflies alight on sheet music belonging to his wife Bronwyn, a musician. In his color and light and the precision of his technique, Fraser's paintings live.

Sometimes we feel movement arrested, frozen as it has just happened. Even in his smaller pieces, the objects--especially the most fragile--carry a mysterious significance. Yet Fraser doesn't spend too much time work­ing out symbolic meaning. Whether the symbolism arises from the sub­conscious, from dreams; or from some peculiarity of his personality, he lets it take care of itself—bringing compositions together largely intu­itively, rather than deliberately.

"I find that sometimes when objects are placed together," Fraser wrote, "they may resonate [in a way] I can't explain, and that subtle mystery and resonance are what I'm after."

Nothing in his world is wasted: Bones he finds in the woods rarely seem to represent death but, like the dried fish, are recycled into lively new art; the shoes his young son outgrows have a host of private and universal implications; fruit, bricks, broken glass all draw his eye, and whatever draws his eye elicits a creative response from him. There are many references to play in his work, and always his quiet humor forbids any pretentiousness.

With his perfect technique, he captures the most ordinary objects, the objects of his daily life, discerning something invaluable about dailiness. So objects that are not in and of themselves significant take on new meaning.

"There's kind of a common quality I am attracted to," he says. "It's a paper plate instead of a beautiful blue Delft object or a Persian rug or [something miffed]. What I'm after is much different than what the. Dutch were after when they were painting goblets and beautifully peeled lemons hanging off the edge of the table. They are gorgeous. But that's just not what I'm seeking, which is something much more simple."

But not too simple. "The Three Graces" features three ripe pears in three different wine glasses. Even without the title, the picture is dryly witty--the precariously perched pears make no sense in the glasses, and in fact are not posed to remind the viewer of grace at all. And yet you can't forget them.

Fraser studied at the Kansas City Art-Institute in the 1970s when abstraction was the rage. He tried abstract work, but aside from teach­ing him a lot about composition, it held little appeal for him. It was soon evident that he was a deeply committed realist. He moved gradual­ly from egg tempera ("too rigid") to acrylics ("too unnatural") to oil.

Living and studying in Germany, he had the opportunity to study the Old Masters. He was drawn to the richness of color, the depth that only oil can achieve, and he switched then permanently to oil, He works on masonite because he prefers a firm surface to the more flexible canvas.

Fraser rarely works with the human figure. Sometimes a self-portrait will appear in a still life. "Reflections," for example, includes a portrait of the artist holding his pet cockatoo reflected in a vase. He scrounges around in his father's barn for the objects of his still lifes. His father is a collector of odd objects, worthless to some people but fascinating trea­sures to others. Fraser then plays with ideas until something definite takes shape in his head. One day his little son bit into a pear and sud­denly thought he might have hurt it. So he asked Fraser to Band Aid the wound closed. The bandaged pear brought all kinds of images into Fraser's ever alert imagination. And bandages started showing up in the oddest places. A bandaged brick, "Brick with Band Aids," is no stranger than "Life Raft VI" in which one pear is stuck with push-pins, and another covered in bandages. The wounded pear and the bandaged pear stand in for human suffering, and without mocking it, Fraser man­ages to help us laugh at it just enough to ease it.

But no matter what the subject of his painting, one obsession graces all: "I do have a real fascination with light," he says. "For instance, white is not a color--you paint all the light that reflects off of the surrounding surfaces to achieve volume." In this vein, he has painted many "studies in white."

He points out how a piece like "Study in White IV" which features white eggs and a white paper plate on a white background with a (more or less) white ruler is really all about color and light. Elegant and full of light, his studies radiate delicate color, subtle and intricate.

It is easy to see why when Fraser speaks of Vermeer he is hushed in admiration for the simplicity and perfection of his work.

"I get great satisfaction looking at what I'm painting and trying to reproduce it as best I can. Looking at the subject, analyzing the light. Trying to get looser--trying to get it right with fewer brush strokes-- trying to say what I have to say with incredible accuracy."

His forte is subtlety--his compositions are stripped down, clean, sim­ple. "I'm not trying to beat anyone over the head with my vision, rather choosing to have it slowly infiltrate the viewer's subconscious. If I tend to isolate and center my subjects, it is simply a direct way of getting at the essence of the objects, treating them as a portrait or an actor on a stage."

Take a straight forward piece like "Ian's Shoes"--seven pairs of brightly colored boy's shoes, obviously well worn, line up along the lower third of the painting. From the tiniest booty-like slippers, to those first tennies, to flip -flops to sandals to rubber boots to tennis shoes to those first rugged athletic shoes, this is a mini history of a child's life--loaded with memories private enough to make you wonder about the shoes' owner, and yet absolutely universal.

Fraser paints the ordinary objects of daily life. He paints them with extraordinary skill. His palette is refined and austere. Following a long tradition of still life painting, reinterpreted in strictly contemporary terms, his work fixes moments of time in paint. But the greatest pleasure in savoring his work is the quiet joy he manages to evoke so often, the sense of the importance and meaning of common things. This is in part his answer to the nihilism of so much contemporary art and thought.

Marilynne S. Mason
Staff Writer,
The Christian Science Monitor

THREE WAY VANITAS - Introduction to the essay
by Scott Fraser

In 2008, I was contacted by David Stork, who is a physicist, engineer, art historian and author of numerous books and journal articles. He requested my permission to analyze one of my paintings, Three Way Vanitas, in the hopes of converting it into a hologram to study the numerous elements of perspective in the piece. I was hesitant to have my image undergo such close scrutiny, but in the end I agreed since he and his team have also done extensive analysis of other art historical works, studying their use of perspective. I felt myself in good company when I saw he had also analyzed paintings by Caravaggio, Van Eyk and others, knowing that he found problems with their perspective too. I have included his essay, which is highly technical but very interesting, along with a link to another site which includes further in depth study of perspective in other artwork. You might want to take a look.

http://www.webexhibits.org/hockneyoptics/post/stork.html

Click the image below to read the essay: