The matter of splatter

By MEGAN NICOL

Neil Frazer lives and works in an old hotel on Sydney's traffic-choked Parramatta Rd.

It is a meandering building, with rooms in odd places, and toilets partitioned into cubicles. Here, in his chaotic top-floor studio, with its plastic-covered floors and walls, he paints.

Vast, vivid paintings, the paint so thick it's tempting to pick at it, to see if a globule, or even a layer, comes away.

This week Frazer, a former Hamilton boy, returns to New Zealand with an exhibition of new works at Milford Galleries.

The 41-year-old painter was born in Canberra but moved to New Zealand as a youngster. He attended the Canterbury University School of Fine arts at Ilam, and then went on to do graduate studies in New York.

In 1992, he moved to Dunedin to take up the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at Otago University, and the following year he was awarded the Artist Residency at Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne.

Three years ago, he and his partner Joanna Braithwaite, also a painter, moved to Sydney.

"It's been great being here. It's just a different world. There are many different kinds of art practice here, whereas in New Zealand I think it's more - I don't want to say fashion-driven - but there's room here for other kinds of art practice. My paintings are gestural and quite physical," he says.

When Frazer says "physical", he's not exaggerating. He deliberately works to his own body-scale, creating his paintings around himself - the final product a manifestation of his bodily presence.

"Internationally, there's been a trend towards abstraction that's more minimal, more flat, and more reductive. Certainly mine goes outside that, and I don't have any qualms about that. The paintings I do are physical and energetic and colourful."

Frazer usually paints first thing in the morning for three or four hours, a relatively short time but, as he admits, for him, the act of painting is draining.

Besides, his paint supplies quickly dwindle. "I do use a lot of paint, and it just kind of disappears."

Small wonder, when you consider that Frazer has a reputation for flinging paint at his canvases. Not random lobs, but calculated flicks with a well-trained and steady hand. In his latest works he has once again eschewed the paintbrush, at least in its more traditional uses, in favour of natural plant materials.

"At times I use real materials to paint with, like branches and plants, which become an extension of my arm, making marks that evoke their origins without being as literal as a brush might be."

It's rare to read anything written about Frazer that doesn't draw parallels with his work and the 1950s American abstract expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock. As with Pollock, the process of painting itself is paramount.

"My paintings reflect the importance for me of the activity of painting, the consideration of its physical possibilities, and the development of surface to its furthest potential."

But while Pollock worked with his canvas on the floor, allowing the paint to drip on to it in round blobs, Frazer works with his canvas upright. He doesn't deny the similarities, but doesn't buy into the assumptions that are made either.

"Obviously I'm the kind of painter who has been influenced by painters like Pollock, but I don't think there are many painters today who haven't been in one way or another. My paintings are quite different from his in lots of ways, especially these more recent works, which are heading off in a different direction.

"I'm looking towards creating a more tangible space in the paintings, where the viewer is invited to enter a deep, believable space. I'm trying to make more of a traditional pictorial space within the picture now."

Frazer's latest works allude more to figuration than the abstraction that characterised his past works.

"There's no particular or obvious reference to trees or foliage, although there are generic landscape references, but I'm trying to get that feel into the work, a natural feel. I guess I'm taking abstract elements to reconfigure a figurative painting."

Preparing to paint, Frazer often gathers research, drawing and photographing the natural world as he finds it.

At first glance it's difficult to connect any detailed study with these energetic paintings, but as you are drawn in through the flickering threshold to the central misty depths, what was previously unrecognisable becomes eerily familiar. Perhaps you're looking at a remote scrubby landscape, or have you zoomed in on organic matter?

Frazer loves paint, and it shows. I can't resist my final question: "So do you spend your life covered in paint?"

He laughs. "I do wear gloves, I've got to say. The stuff is pretty toxic, but yeah, I do get covered. I get involved in the material."