Charleston In My Time: The Paintings of West Fraser University of South Carolina Press, 2001

Because I prefer to have lived with an artist's work for a while and not be pressured to "sound off" about something I haven't at least tried to assimilate, I have reviewed this book from memory. I have not provided facts unless I was certain of them; the rest I have let alone. This review is not about a particular painting anyhow; it is about an artist's development; his strengths and flaws; his prospects and possibilities. I apologize for any factual errors
- or oversights.

Charleston in My Time is the sort of volume artist/producers dream about: it provides the artist an almost unlimited opportunity to strut his stuff; sets the stage for his development; and respectfully reproduces work from the most significant phases of his career. Very few living artists are favored with such a volume and I think West Fraser, the recipient of this honor, is duly sensible.

The book's "scholarly" approach, however, falls flat.
It may well be addressed to a provinicial audience keenly curious about the art and artists of the lowcountry, as I think rural South Carolina is known to its own people, but there isn't much to recommend it to a general audience. The art of South Carolina's past is - as everywhere - uneven in quality, but is perceived in this volume with an almost outlandish adoration. This sort of uncritical reverence might be seen as indigenous to Southern people - as it is. But it also speaks of a narcissism that might be pardonable in the collector, but has no place in the critical analysis of one's predecessors.

I would have preferred to hear more about the artist himself, perhaps in diary form or interview format.
He is allowed to provide some biographical information, but it is scant. The book is his; Fraser's artistic forebears are merely footnotes and should be treated as such. People are, in the main, curious not only about an artist's life, but his struggles and triumphs. Of these, the book gives us
dribs and drabs, but is mostly silent.

Just for the record: Fraser outdoes all the dead people, with the possible exception of Alice Ravenel-Smith, whose watercolors are drenched in a personal lyricism that transcends regional affiliation. She should be better known, and perhaps will be. Over the past ten years, there's been a great deal of grabbing going on. Dealers and curators from elsewhere might want to start grabbing up forgotten Southerners and start re-introducing them to their conceputally fogged audiences on either coast.

At its finest, Mr. Fraser's work is impressionist in color and realist in feeling. Even failed paintings have the attributes of impressionism: deep space, optical color, "picturesque" design. (The realist's self-critical detachment is, however, missing.) Mr.
Fraser started out in watercolor and worked largely from photographs. In these early watercolors he is for the most part literal, though he is occasionally redeemed by his genuine feeling for place as well as his spirited drawing and design. However, they are fatally flawed in their reliance on a photographic source and do not begin to approach his more mature integration of subject and seeing. However, there are some brilliant foreshadowings. I think he made an excellent decision (if it was that) not to turn to oil until he "got his chops" on paper. Everything he would do later on canvas, he more or less anticipates in his watercolors. Yet the watercolors for the most part lack the masterful spontaneity and suggested form of his best oils.

When he begins with oil, he lacks substance. He seems to be somewhat color-mad, unable to find his way into the form of his subjects. But as he begins to hit his stride, we begin to observe a shift from mere experimentation to a dawning sense of purpose. His very worst faults are mostly ironed out. When he hits his stride, he is able to create completely convincing, not to say breathtaking, illusions of a cityscape known largely for its old world charm; palm-fronded landscapes in which the air is felt; spectacularly vivid sunsets in which land and sky are fused both spatially and conceptually. There is no "girly girly romance", to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, about these paintings - even if they are, at bottom, "romantic." Fraser obviously loves his Low-country subjects as well as his adopted city - sanitized somewhat after Hurricane Camille swept through it. The book leaves off some years ago, but there's a suggestion of tremendous potential in his panoramic cityscapes, painted from a sweeping vantage point, like some of his early watercolors. His greatest cityscape is here, a magnificently constructed panorama of an old, but vital place we've come to know pretty well in earlier, more selective views. There is an astonishing unity here: of roof and steeple; apartment and townhouse; of color, light, and form. This creative fusion of visible phenomena is what landscape painting, from Constable to Wyeth, is all about and Fraser understands it very well.

Embarrassing, however, are titles that suggest bad Nineteenth-century poetry or overblown religious sentiments, as in "God's Golden Light" - otherwise an excellent painting. His figures are lopped-off humanoids whose blocky movements seldom lead anywhere.
There is a painting of a bunch of good ole boys, complete with Confederate flags, out on the bay in their motorboats. You might as well just wrap them all in white sheets and call it "Singin' Dixie."
There are slews of paintings of the merely picturesque that may hardly surpass the local talent. The worst of these paintings seem to shill the charm of the old city for tourists and other gullible outsiders. Some are downright bad and shouldn't have been reproduced.
I'm thinking of particular images here: of a pyramidal form in a graveyard; another of uncertain palm-like foliage done in feathery greens and puky lavenders.

To his credit, Fraser is rarely as bad as this and should not be judged by a few anomalous missteps.

He sometimes commits himself to series' that really don't require quite so much repitition. I'm sure he's aware of Monet's preoccupation with the fleeting effects of light on a particular subject and has wished to duplicate that experiment. In some cases, he pulls it off; in others, well, he doesn't. In this particular circumstance, the work should be selected carefully. Here very little care seems to be present.

When compared to a truly great artist, like Edward Hopper, who might also be identified with a particular place, Fraser falls short. One might liken his best efforts to Hopper's watercolors, also on-site explorations of a specific subject and impeccable in this regard. Fraser is a master of the sort of reflected light and color-drenched palette necessary to plein air painting. Fraser is fundamentally an eye-painter and not an artist in the sense that Hopper, or even Burchfield, was. He is a sort of masterful technician whose incredible bravura can often hinder an inner vision. He does not invent, he merely records. He has no vaulting imagination; his talent resides mostly in his eye and hand. He doesn't have the sense of the tragic any of number of his literary counterparts have had and can't, it would seem, endure scenes of poverty and human distress without sweetening them up and making them picturesque.

However, what Fraser can do well is considerable.
Witness the plethora of bad impressionist paintings that overflow Red State galleries. He is an excellent designer and an interpreter of light with few equals.
His forms look real; that is to say, they are rooted in something - are made of something. Painting tactile surfaces is also a considerable accomplishment. He can show you hard noon light on a plaster wall and make it stick in your imagination as the definitive interpretation. He is able show us what a deserted street in a good-time old town feels like, with its few electric lights and irrelevant church steeple. He'll guide you down a footpath toward a shack along some sandy road and you feel you're there, walking barefoot.

I would prefer a greater sense of the monumental, less emphasis on the picturesque, more empathy - for want of a better word. But within his limitations, Fraser is a very good painter indeed. And that is more than good enough. I'll take it over just about everything else there is in representational painting today.

Remember, however: I said almost.