ABOUT Phil Fraser
I have been most influenced by the work of Cezanne and empathise with his late watercolours which reduce everything to thin veils of coloured planes. Detail is often sacrificed or absorbed into an overall spacial structure and, certainly, the ‘space between things’ is as important as the ‘things’ themselves.
I studied Art History at Essex University, completing my MA in the late seventies. After living for three years in Venezuela I started painting on a daily basis in 1983. The following year I moved to Spain where I lived and worked for six years. During this time I had numerous one man shows in and around Barcelona.
I returned to England in 1991 and continued to develop my watercolour style and up to the mid 1990’s exhibited widely throughout England and in Scotland. In 1995 I took part in the annual exhibition at the Mall in London.
During the late 1990’s I continued to paint part time and undertook a number of private commissions. In 1998 I was commissioned by the National Trust to mount an exhibition of my paintings of the house and gardens of Peckover House, Wisbech, to celebrate its 50th anniversary as a National Trust property.
In the summer of 2000 I started to paint full time again and in 2004 set up the Grove House Gallery in Grassington, North Yorkshire where I have lived and worked ever since.
As a full time painter I have participated in and been accepted for annual watercolour exhibitions at the Mall and Bankside Galleries in London. I have been accepted for the Times Watercolour competition a number of times as well as the Harrogate Open. I regularly participate in the North Yorkshire Open Studios Exhibition from my gallery in Grassington.
Although the light and contrasts of colour in England do not match the intensities of those I painted in Spain, I find the English landscape more alluring and verdant. There is an almost parkland quality to many parts of the English countryside with its balance of rolling pastoral farmland and scattered woodland. Now that I live in the Yorkshire Dales my subject matter ranges from the shallow, intimate spaces of gardens, woodland paths and rivers to the wilder open landscapes of the moors, fells and valleys of the Yorkshire Dales.
