It’s been a busy six months outside of the studio, but I did still find time to paint. Here are the fruits of my labors as I finally got around to posting images of my work from this past fall and winter! I put down the oil paints for about 9 months just working in watercolour, mostly large format.   I was focused on pushing the medium of watercolour to its limits and discovering its expressive potential. Playing with the transparencies and opacities of different pigments through building up and washing off layers upon layers of paint.

gordonfraserfinearts.com

Here’s a large format watercolour I just finished last week.

Gordon Fraser / untitled / 2008 / watercolour, pastel, guache on paper / 44 x 30 inches (2 Panels) / gordonfraserfinearts.com

Should craft matter? In the age of maufactured obsolescence when products are designed to be discarded in six months or a year, in the age of art as investment when people are paying ridiculous sums of money for ridiculous art, should craft matter? I’ve been thinking about this question lately. Walking through the galleries I see a lot of mixed media paintings where artists have mixed oil, acrylic, ink and other media together in one piece. I have seen paint squeezed out of tubes on to unstretched, ungessoed canvas, drawings and oil paintings on newsprint. All of which suggest either a willful neglect or ignorance of materials and craft. Often times it feels like the balance has swung too far in the direction of experimentation, direct expression, originality for fear of becoming academic. It seems to me there is a mistaken belief that craft knowledge hinders one’s ability to create new and meaningful artwork. Of course craft knowledge and technique alone are no guarantee of making good art, a quick glimpse of the current show of the American Watercolor Society at the Salmagundi Club is enough to prove that point.

Anyway, the thought occurred to me last night that if I bought a new house, or had construction work done on a house, and within a few years it started to fall apart because of shoddy craftsmanship and materials, I would be suing the contractors and developers. I’m surprised there isn’t as much outrage when the same thing happens to works of art. If were going to drop $60,000 – $100,000 on a piece of artwork, I don’t care who the artist is, I would want to make damn sure that it would not fall apart in 5-10 years. Maybe there is and I just don’t know about it. Maybe from the collectors’ point of view it is just one of the risks of investment.

But in all fairness to the artists, there is so much stupid money out there right now. If someone is willing to pay me $20,000 for the newspaper I clean my brushes with, then god bless them and thanks for the money. It’s like a fox in the hen house. Anyway, I’d just make sure I’d sign a contract absolving me of all future responsibility for the condition.

after cecille / prismacolor / 5″ x 6″
© 2007 gordon fraser. all rights reserved. www.gordonfraserfinearts.com

I posted the above drawing to a drawing forum on artreview.com and received a number of replies from the impassioned defense, to the legitimate questioning, to the ridiculous dismissal/panning by the court jester who’s now out rummaging through his kids nursery school art projects in the hopes of getting rich. I then posted the following reply. [see the whole conversation here...]

Byron, Alaleh and Jonathan all raise some interesting questions, establishment vs. anti-establishment, abstraction vs. realism, illustration, decoration, basically the stuff we as artists (an the non-artists critics) have been tangling with for the last 150 years! I started to jot down some notes and realized I have a lot to say about all of them. At this point I will have to sidebar those discussions to a different forum so as not to take away from the art being shown here. That being said, given that this is “Show and Tell” I will offer a few comments. For the purpose of the discussion I will try to separate formal questions from questions of content, but in reality in the process of drawing, the concerns interpenetrate and cannot be separated. First, in terms of content, this painting is about desire, pretty straight forward establishment content going back hundreds/thousands of years, so to byron’s point I do not view this piece as anti-establishment. It is a question/conversation/meditation I have been engaged with for about six months and it offers one viewpoint among many. The brief history is that this project began as 5 minute poses in the studio with a clothed model, who happens to be a dancer, over a two week period back in october. The initial studio sketches were executed in watercolour and I have carried on this work in oil, watercolour, collage, and prismacolor pencils, using both the sketches and memory of some poses as inspiration. This is one example.

Now to the more formal issues:
1) Mark making – I have used gestural marks and scribbles to convey the energy and excitement of desire, which often can feel uncontrollable and overwhelming when it is being experience.

2) colour – the dominant colour of the piece is red, chosen first off because the model has red hair and there was red fabric hanging on the wall behind where the model was posing. I then pushed and changed the hue, layering different reds (which unfortunately can’t be seen so well on the computer screen) in order to develop a sense of the warmth, heat, and excitement of desire. The red moves very quickly toward the viewer and allows me to pull the background right to the surface, compressing the space of whole composition. Secondarily, the two blue planes sandwich and squeeze the red plane, creating a dynamic tension and opening up the space of the composition.

3) composition – the compositional structure is very simple, built on a tilted plane, stolen from the italian masters such as Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, etc., to provide a dynamic structure to both house and convey energy and excitement. It helps create the movement and space in the drawing.

Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), Woman and Bicycle, 1952-53, Oil on canvas, 76 1/2 x 49 in. (194.3 x 124.5 cm)
© 2000 Willem de Kooning Revocable Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
www.whitney.org

I’ve been thinking about Woman and Bicycle by Willem De Kooning for the past couple of days know, specifically about abstract painting prodding us as viewers to move beyond literal visual experience. I first saw this painting about a year ago at the Whitney Museum during the exhibition Picasso and American Art. I was standing in front of the painting, which is quite big about six feet high, alternating between getting up close and examining the surface with its layers and layers of oil paint, and stepping back to view the canvas as a whole. As I’m moving in to examine a particularly interesting passage slapped on and scrapped with a spackle knife, this older gentleman shoulders me out of the way and asks, “Where is the bicycle? Do you see the bicycle? I can’t see the bicycle! Can you show me the bicycle?” Annoyed I point to areas of the canvas and say here’s the seat, here are the handle bars, there’s one wheel and there’s the other. Frustrated, he said, “I still don’t see it!” and frumped away leaving me in peace to enjoy the painting, to picture in my mind a woman cruising on a bicycle out in East Hampton of Montauk on the east end of Long Island, warm summer breeze blowing through the fields, to forget the Whitney Museum on a dreary winter day in New York City crowded with people fawning over Picasso, Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock.

Now looking at the painting we could do a formal analysis and talk about the overlapping planes of color and about how De Kooning compresses the space of the painting and attaches everything to the surface or about how the woman appears to be hanging from the top of the canvas, interesting issues for painters. Or we could psychoanalyze De Kooning and talk about sexual desire, anger and the fierce power of his women paintings. Either way they all seem to miss the point.

The truth is when you look at Woman and Bicycle, you don’t see a woman and a bicycle and you’re not supposed to. This isn’t a photograph or a silent film of a woman riding a bicycle. It’s a painting. The title is only a clue to the inspiration for the painting, a woman riding a bicycle, which was probably something De Kooning say fairly often out in East Hampton. But it captured his imagination, for whatever reason, and the painting is trying to capture ours as well. She beckons us to imagine a woman riding a bicycle on a sunny summer day. To picture it in our minds. To be the woman riding the bicycle. To feel the breeze. The warm sun. To smell the salty air or the cow shit, or the car exhaust, where ever we happen to be riding our bike. When the painting has inspired our imaginations to be the woman on the bicycle the we can see the woman on the bicycle, we see the painting. That is the beauty of abstract painting.