Two artist friends, the painter Neil Frazer and photographer Craig Potton, have spent many decades exploring and creating images of New Zealand’s remote and rugged coastlines. In All at Sea they combine both their paintings and photographs to present haunting and beautiful work, inspired by the ocean’s power and wild sublimity. In this book you witness a concurrence of vision, and an admission they both share of feeling almost overwhelmed by the intensity of these coastal landscapes. All at Sea is testimony to their love of place, but also a poignant plea for us to change our attitude towards our oceans, which are threatened by global warming, overfishing and pollution on a horrendous scale. All at Sea is a large format book with the highest quality of reproduction, an artbook to treasure and inspire.
Neil Frazer
Neil Frazer is a seventh generation New Zealander who was born in Canberra, Australia in 1961. He completed a BFA at Canterbury University in Christchurch before studying in painting at The New York Studio School on a Fulbright scholarship. Frazer received the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago, Dunedin in 1993, and was an artist in residence at the Victoria College of the Arts in Victoria, Australia in 1994. In 1999 Frazer moved to Sydney, Australia to complete an MFA in painting at the University of New South Wales.
Frazer is represented in major public and private collections in NZ and Australia. He is a painter whose large gestural works celebrate the power and drama of the natural world without reference to human intervention. He travels within and throughout the landscapes he paints in order to experience, gather and absorb its grandeur.
In Frazer’s large-scale oil paintings, paint is often laid in thick impasto so that it protrudes from the canvas. Frazer works his canvases on the vertical, attached to the wall, and applies the paint in a variety of ways, including rags, brushes and his own hands. Often in the later stages, he flicks the paint with his fingers straight from the tube onto the canvas, the twist of his wrist creating regular, bright loops of colour which articulate the surface of the painting, erupting away from the receding nebulous tones of the background.
