David Frazer

David Frazer is an Australian artist renowned for fine wood engravings, linocuts, etching and lithographs as well as his sculptures and paintings.

                           

Frazer's work explores a sense of place, and the emotions of longing, nostalgia and isolation that accompany it. The universal yearning to be 'somewhere else' is a common thread throughout. It exists in his figures amidst bleak Australian landscapes, along with those fixed in a foreign locale. Combined with this is a gentle sense of whimsy and humour. Frazer's skill as a storyteller is always present in the strong narrative component of both his paintings and his prints.

 

Frazer is the recipient of many awards in Australia and Internationally. In 2007, he took part in the International Print Biennale in China where he was the major prizewinner. He was also awarded first prize at the 2019 Cossack Art Awards in Western Australia.

 

Australian artist David Frazer spent his childhood amid the flat wheat fields of the WImmera region in Victoria's west, where his father was a school principal. He felt himself an outsider, torn between his love for the region and a desperation to escape it. As a boy, escape was found among the elevated branches of a tree or atop the roof, looking out across a landscape infused with a certain poetic, melancholic beauty. He reflects:

 

 

The family moved to Rosebud as Frazer commenced high school, and later he enrolled in art school at Caulfield Tech (now Monash University) where, by his own admission, he learned little. Painting was a struggle and the wrong medium through which to channel his storytelling . Music, particularly song writing, was where his heart lay, but it did not come naturally: 'I really wanted to write songs - really beautiful, sad songs. I tried, but I just couldn't do it.' 

 

When aged thirty, Frazer was introduced to wood engraving, 'It was love at first sight'. In the twenty-five years since, he has exhibited in more than forty solo shows and gained accolades and recognition. Through printmaking, he found parallels with song writing, the art form being historically and intrinsically associated with narrative illustration and responsive to text, poetry and lyrics. 

 

A Kind Of Prayer is one work in a larger suite that gives visual form to singer-songwriter Nick Cave's 'Love Letter', from which the print draws its title. First released on Cave's spoken word album The Secret Life of The Love Song, the song's lyrics recount the sorrowful appeal of a man in a faltering relationship, as he stands on the cusp of posting a letter: 'a plea, a petition' to his partner that they rebuild what they once shared. 

 

Frazer included A Kind of Prayer in his 2021 limited-edition artist book of illustrating Cave's lyrics, revealing his alignment of image and narrative, setting it against the verse: 'I kiss the cold white envelope / I press my lips against her name'. What we initially presumed by the work's title - an encounter with the Divine - becomes grounded in an earthly relationship. 

 

There is a temptation to find resonance in Frazer's 'love and empathy for the misfits and the lost man' in the solitary, highly recognisable figure of fellow artist Rick Amor's 'Running Man', who seemingly always seeks an escape. An ardent atheist, Amor has described the origins of this motif as an early 1980s depiction of the Biblical Cain escaping into the desert, 'fleeing the eye of God'. 

 

While Amor's Cain is, at one level, in stark contrast to Frazer's subservient figure, the tormented, lone figures of both nonetheless find parallels. 'Delusion. failed ambition and confused, bewildered men - I find it's … fertile subject matter' Frazer notes of his own lone figure. 

 

Within this we might find a deeper spiritual undercurrent to Frazer's a Kind of Prayer, informed perhaps by, the lyricist. In the same way the closing refrain of Cave's song has his protagonist cry out, 'The rain with a letter and a prayer / Whispered on the wind / Come back to me / Come back to me', Frazer may have equally drawn upon the psalmist's impassioned cry: 'Don't hide yourself from me! Don't be angry with me … You have been my help; don't leave me, don't abandon me'.