Fraser, Donald Hamilton

About the artist

“Donald Hamilton Fraser…was one of the most successful and well-regarded young Modernist painters of the immediate postwar generation, his boldly-handled and richly-coloured semi-abstract landscapes and still-lifes establishing him as a promising exponent of the latest Ecole de Paris style….

“Synthesising techniques drawn from De Staël’s abstract Tachiste style with his own instincts for the figurative aspects of landscape and still-life, Fraser arrived at an essentially expressionist technique of clear, brilliant colour and thick, stiff impasto paint. To achieve this he evolved a distinctly eccentric technique of mixing each colour on a page of an old telephone directory, tearing them out as he finished and before going on to the next colour, the paper also absorbing much of the surplus oil paint…

“He liked to describe his work as “semi-abstract pictures based on landscape.”

(From the artist’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph September 4th 2009)