Donald Hamilton Fraser British, 1929-2009

Donald Hamilton Fraser is a highly acclaimed British painter. Fraser dramatised his subjects with bold colours and a confident brush. His work employs a language of visual metaphor in which abstract and descriptive elements combine to express a heightened experience of the subject. His vibrant landscapes and bold still lifes were highly acclaimed during his lifetime and his work was widely exhibited in London, Paris and New York.

Inspired by the Scottish Highlands of his ancestors, Donald Hamilton Fraser depicted this rugged landscape like no other artist. Captured in all its myriad guises, according to the fleeting effects of light and atmosphere, Fraser transformed the Highland landscape into vivid swathes of colour. Fraser was a master at capturing an array of subjects, from the natural landscape to vibrant still lives. He adored the expressive nature of paint and the striking juxtaposition of primary colours, often layering them onto the canvas with a palette knife to produce an almost collage-like effect. Under his deft brush, the tradition of still life painting is distorted to form abstract almost dream-like fields of colour.

Fraser studied at the prestigious St. Martin's School of Art from 1949 to 1952 alongside notable contemporaries including Jack Smith, Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and his close friend Peter Kinley.  For many young artists in the early 1950s, they felt a need to become either an abstract or a figurative artist. Fraser did not feel these had to be mutually exclusive, and an exhibition of the work of Nicolas de Staël at Matthiesson's on Bond Street in 1952 acted as catalyst to reconcile these two styles within his work.