DAVID FRAZER

risd connection: Professor, Department of Painting; BFA in Painting, 1970; teaching at RISD since 1978

about the artist: David Frazer paints in a spontaneous, improvisational style, working immediately with paint rather than planning his composition with drawings. Though he uses only brush and paints, his work alludes to collage and printmaking — an aesthetic that art critic Miles Unger describes as “fundamental to our way of looking at the world.... [R]eference bumps up against reference, mode against mode: old fashioned images taken from woodcut illustrations sit next to others that seem photographically derived; eccentric bestiaries and floral catalogs cohabit with passages of gestural or formal abstraction.” In Balanced Edge, for example, clearly recognizable images of tulips, wood-grain texture, dodo birds and rodents share a canvas with “passages of bold, abstract painting” in a “savory bouillabaisse [made] out of deliberately secondhand ingredients.”

roles at risd: Returning to RISD to teach more than 25 years ago (after earning his BFA here in 1970), Frazer began as a part-time instructor in freshman Foundation Studies. He eventually switched to Painting, and from 1995 to ’97 served as Chief Critic of the European Honors Program in Rome — a program he directed in 1997-98. He has taught in the Summer Fine Art Program in Rome since 1996, and from 1999 to 2002 he was coordinator of the Architecture and Fine Art programs there. In addition to serving on a variety of academic and administrative committees, Frazer was a leader in the Part-Time Faculty Association in the early ’80s and organized the first Faculty Congress in 1986-87.

insights: (1) “Students should pursue their major from a position of passion, rather than practicality. You cannot be a good architect just because it’s a decent way to make a living.” (2) “Don’t expect to be inspired before you work. Inspiration will come because you are working.” (3) “I find in William Butler Yeats’ poem ‘Adam’s Curse’ a literary equivalent to my work. Adam’s curse is his punishment, a curse on the land that will grow thorns and thistle and require hardship and toil in order to make things grow. Yeats sees this as a metaphor for poetry. Poetry is hard work that aspires to beauty. This seems equivalent to my experience as a painter.”

selected solo exhibitions
2004 BankRI, Providence, RI
2004, 2003, 2001 Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI
2002 risd|works, Providence, RI
2000 Arno Maris Gallery, Westfield State College, Westfield, MA
2000 Full Circle Gallery, Providence, RI
2000, 1995 Broomfield Gallery, Boston, MA
1997, 1996 Palazzo Cenci, Rome, Italy

selected group exhibitions
2004, Sears-Peyton Gallery, NYC
2004, 2003, 1995 Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI
2002 Concord Art Association, Concord, MA
2001 Attleboro Museum, MA
2000 Clark Gallery, Concord, MA
2000 Rhode Island Foundation Gallery, Providence, RI
2000 Barrett Art Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
1998 Per un albero, Nemi, Italy
1994 Contemporary Art in Rhode Island, The RISD Museum, Providence, RI
1991 Rhode Island Collections, Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI

education
University of New Mexico, MA in Painting, 1976
Bridgewater State College, K-12 Teaching Certification in Art, 1972
RISD, BFA in Painting, 1970