Art News

Telfair Museums features "Paintings by West Fraser"

artwork: West Fraser - "Savannah River", 1985 - Watercolor on paper - 21 ¼" x 38 5/8" - Collection of the Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia. On view in "A Native Son: Paintings by West Fraser" from from February 24th until May 6th 2012.


Savannah, Georgia.- The Telfair Museums are proud to present “A Native Son: Paintings by West Fraser”, at the Telfair Academy from February 24th through May 6th. Despite coming of age at a time when modernism and abstraction had achieved a firm hold on the prevailing modes of art instruction throughout the country, West Fraser has remained a traditionalist, earning a place among the region’s leading practitioners of traditional realism. Fraser was born in Savannah in 1955 and has spent most of the past three decades working in the South Carolina Low Country and coastal Georgia. He is particularly well known for his luminous landscapes (many, though not all, of which are painted en plein air) and engaging city scenes.
“A Native Son: Paintings by West Fraser” considers the landscapes, marine views, and city scenes for which Fraser is best known, as well as travel paintings created around the world and figure-based compositions depicting family, friends, and the artist himself. Consisting of approximately 55 works, the exhibition also demonstrates the evolution of Fraser’s technique, beginning with his large-scale watercolors of the 1980s, which were painted from photographs in the artist’s studio.