David Frazer, The crooked tree, linocut, edition of 50, 51 x 67.5cm. Photo: David Frazer and Beaver Galleries.
David Frazer and Cathy Franzi are the two final artists to hold solo exhibitions at the Beaver Galleries before they close for good at the beginning of December.
Frazer is a printmaker based in Victoria who has, over the past three decades, established an international reputation for exquisite, detailed linocuts and etchings that explore a somewhat wistful rural atmosphere set somewhere in the Australian bush.
The work, more often than not, possesses a narrative that is permeated with lyrical and philosophical overtones, sometimes with a touch of the absurd. Frazer frequently collaborates with poets and singer-songwriters, including Nick Cave, on elaborate artist’s books.
A key image in this exhibition, The crooked tree, a large, glorious linocut, has arisen out of his collaboration with the American singer-songwriter Tom Waits.
Waits relates an anecdote: “My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. ‘Why don’t you have a straight job like everyone else?’ they asked me the other day. I told them this story: in the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, “Look at me … I’m tall, and I’m straight, and I’m handsome. Look at you … you’re all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.” And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, ‘Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest’. So, the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”
David Frazer, Two trees entwined, linocut, edition of 50, 90 x 75cm. Photo: David Frazer and Beaver Galleries.
Frazer’s large linocut, The Crooked Tree, 2024, presents the solitary crooked tree in a forest that is a scene of devastation where all of the other trees have been felled at the base. The tree is shown like an anthropocentric being mentioned in Waits’ tale, something that grows stronger and stranger with time and now stands in a landscape of tears where the clouds have a physical presence as real and as solid as the ground and tree stumps below.
Throughout this series of prints, trees represent people as they are shown embracing, lonely within a crowd or broken by age. As in much of Frazer’s work, the autobiographical element is rarely far from the surface as we catch a glimpse of an artist contemplating his place in society, marking the passage of time and the whole process of aging. With a deceptive simplicity, Frazer explores with lucidity some of the fundamental aspects of human existence in beautifully conceived and executed images that are both lyrical and memorable and contain a touch of melancholy.
David Frazer, Falling limb, linocut, edition of 50, 71 x 52cm. Photo: David Frazer and Beaver Galleries.
The detailed linocuts, including Two trees entwined, Falling limb and Walking for solace (composition II), explore the human condition as played out by a cast of trees.
His immaculately worked, detailed relief prints create a world that is simultaneously fantastic and surreal, yet it possesses a tangible reality that we can inhabit through our imaginations. Frazer’s prints have all the enchantment of an illuminated fairy tale, where fantasy has as much sway as the laws of nature, and the human figure appears as slightly awkward and out of place in the natural setting.
Although elements of the absurd are never far from the surface, many of his prints are like visual parables – a simple narrative that illustrates a deeper moral or philosophy.
David Frazer, Walking for solace (composition II), linocut, 2 panels, edition of 50, 114 x 134cm. Photo: David Frazer and Beaver Galleries
This is Frazer’s 10th solo exhibition at the Beaver Galleries, shows that span the last two decades.
Cathy Franzi is now a Canberra-based ceramicist and scientist who is having her fifth solo exhibition at this gallery. What has always attracted me to her art is the precision with which she combines her observations from nature – the exceptional botanical accuracy – and the exceptional variety of techniques with which she manages to depict these observations in her ceramics.
Cathy Franzi, Tufted Blue Lily, porcelain, wheel-thrown and altered, sgraffito, engobe, 45 x 18.5 x 18cm. Photo: Cathy Franzi and Beaver Galleries
A piece such as Tufted Blue Lily, at first glance, has a simplicity and elegance that disguises the complexity and alchemy of its creation.
At the conclusion of these exhibitions, the Beaver Galleries will hold a series of stock shows before they close.
David Frazer: Solace – prints, and Cathy Franzi: This place, this time – ceramics, runs from 17 October to 2 November, at Beaver Galleries, 81 Denison St, Deakin.
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