ALEXANDER FRASER RSA
MUCHALLS FOLK ART
Pheppie Farm, oil on canvas, 34 x 39cm LIST OF WORKS 1.
Exit Music
9.
2.
Skull and Crossed Brushes
10. Counting Heads
3.
How High the Moon
11. Seaside Coup
Muchalls Folk Art
4. From Gagarin’s Point of View
12. Gable Ends
5.
The Painter, His Trousers & Shirt
13. Souk
6.
Sunflower, Birds & Beekeeper
14. Pheppie Farm
7.
Pandora’s Cardboard Box
15. Mayan Ball Game
8.
Silver Still Life
The Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL T: 0131 624 6556 info@royalscottishacademy.org www.royalscottishacademy.org The RSA is a charity registered in Scotland (SC004198)
From Gagarin’s Point of View, oil on canvas, 183 x 152cm
Seaside Coup (detail), oil on canvas, 34 x 39cm
Photographs by Stuart Johnstone
Sunflower, Birds & Beekeeper, oil on canvas, 155 x 134cm
Alexander Fraser RSA Front cover: Exit Music, oil on canvas, 213 x 152cm
13 JUNE - 19 JULY 2015
Alexander Fraser RSA Muchalls Folk Art Sandy Fraser’s new paintings exhibit all the characteristics of the postmodern artist and as such are full of images and insights about knowledge and the world, while consciously avoiding definition, notions of truth or meaning. In these new, large works, the artist also continues to play with variations of painting language within the same canvas. He moves easily from spatial illusion with volume and cast shadows, to painterly patterns and linear forms. With these means, he explores a wealth of visual reference material which he has made his own through many drawings and paintings. The transition from one painting language to another is much less clear in these new works and this evokes a greater sense of freedom to play with his library of diverse images. The decision-making appears wholly intuitive and each move is made in response to what has already been created. In short, he has achieved the mastery of his painting world and the “force is with him”. Ah, if it were only that simple! To create this illusion of artistic fluency and freedom is hard won and the result of hours of revision, driven by fluctuating confidence and conflicting ideas. These works testify to this journey, where a final flourish of painterly flair and resolution disguises the hard road. Joy and beauty are restored, at a cost. Images and objects appear, conjured from passages of paint. Areas of colour are offset by a wide range of subtle tonal mixes and the whole surface sparkles with variety in handling, layered brushwork and mark-making. Every element intuitively selected and placed, achieves a compositional balance. This goes at least some way to explain why each work is unique and worthy of our time and contemplation. I used the word transition earlier and if one surveys the breadth of Sandy’s painting practice: we see an initial academic figurative training and an early Left: How High the Moon, oil on canvas, 213 x 152cm
emergence into abstraction during the 1960’s with a defining solo exhibition at the Demarco Gallery in 1972. A succession of works follow about the artists location on the North East coast. These works include abstract elements. The oil painting Shankar at the Blue Piggery (Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums) is a good example. This is followed by a brief but stunning commitment to large scale painterly non figuration and a major exhibition at the New 57 Gallery in Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket in 1984. He then painted himself out of that territory, returning to drawing and these drawn images were then placed together with painterly gestural passages. These developments came to fruition in his hugely ambitious exhibition at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery where “Fraser started tentatively, yet quite instinctively to include figures-and figures of such draughstmanlike precision and sensitivity that one wandered whether they had not been struggling for the last twenty years to free themselves from layer upon layer of pure paint” (Ian Gale). This development was fully realised in the last two major works, which were to establish the parameters for the next decade. As a direct result, Sandy was invited to undertake an important portrait commission and its success led to two or three commissions per year between 1989 and 1998. It is interesting to note that several of the portraits contain a passage in the background which is clearly the artist’s invention. Following on from the success at Talbot Rice, his paintings return to Muchalls as a backdrop to highly personal figure compositions...an ethereal, surreal, domestic theatre which includes his wife Helen and an elusive series of references to the artist and his family. A variety of animals share these spaces. These works reveal his deep underlying interest in the great art of Spain and Italy, in particular to Goya and Velásquez. They also begin to include multicultural imagery digested from years of world travel and reveal
a deep interest in anthropology and mythology. This new body of work was shown with considerable success at the Scottish Gallery in 1998 and is explored by Ian Gale in its publication Alexander Fraser New Paintings. Each of these phases included lengthy transitions, as changes were tested with both reference and handling. It is interesting that perhaps its the notion of transition that has finally arrived as the core idea and which has evolved through four solo exhibitions at the Scottish Gallery between 2000 and 2012 and also his annual commitment to exhibit major works at the Royal Scottish Academy. To return to Muchalls Folk Art, in these most recent paintings there is an even greater fluency and a growing variety of fascinating character forms for the viewer to follow from one work to the next. We see toys interchangeable with religious icons, we see origami trees and paper aeroplanes, clowns, happy and sad. We see numerous birds and animals and a good deal of metamorphosis. Thumbnail self-portraits with characteristic beret (rather like Tin Tin) pop up here and there. As well as all of this activity, backgrounds also vary, with different versions of the sea, folded paper, tilted studio table and palette, textures or painted patterns. The character forms can be clearly defined and recognisable in one painting, to return in a more abstract guise or as a more painterly, colourful version in another. They can even be repeated in the same work with a change of scale and yet all is managed with beautifully orchestrated colour and tone. This is the artist at his most inventive and playful. The new painting is as free of agenda and constraints as one can be. His ambition, knowledge, experience and spirit unified. This is certainly what these works communicate to me. Alan Robb RSA
May 2015