Neil Frazer: All at Sea (2025)

EXHIBITION DATES | 18 Oct - 10 Nov 2025

ARTIST TALK | Neil Frazer 5 pm, Saturday 18 October

Neil Frazer celebrates the extremes of New Zealand's natural landscape. Whether he is painting the brittle atmosphere of our highest peaks or the roiling surf of our coasts, he rejoices in the sublime grandeur of the country's natural power.

All at Sea, which coincides with his recent book of the same title co-produced with photographer Craig Potton, focuses on the overwhelming wildness and constantly changing character of our seas at the points where they touch the land.

Frazer fills his canvases with the immersive grandeur of the ocean and the rugged forms of our coasts. His images display the stacks and cliffs of the northwestern South Island, including some landforms which he has repeatedly returned to during his career. The elephantine forms of the weathered islets of Great Divide and Blue Arch are particular favourites, which have recurred frequently.

Unlike many of Frazer’s mountain studies, the skies of these seascapes are also textured, though they remain gentle, with only wisps of cloud. They remain a negative space in several of the works, especially those in which sea stacks have been depicted through the natural framing of rock arches and cave mouths. The flat mirrored panes of wet sand also become more that just reflection, but speak of their own negatives, looking-glass landscapes where the energy of the ocean and rock are reduced to a calm sheen.

The use of these powerful compositional devices creates a picture within a picture, and when juxtaposed with the tectonic impasto swirls of rock create a strong tension within the picture plane. In Hidden Cave this technique is used to draw the eye to the still, calm distance via a Turneresque vortex of light. In works such as Sea Window, the photographs of Shackleton's Antarctic expeditions, spectacularly captured by Frank Hurley, are also evoked.

In Frazer's paintings, we are filled with a sense of awe about the land, sea, and sky, and the collision point between these great forces. It is as if immense power has been captured in the artist's brush, trapped against the canvas but ready to break free at a moment's notice. This is no more evident that in the crests and troughs of the epic Nexus, which vividly captures the moment of collision between massive ocean waves.

Frazer's art is a bold and dynamic celebration of nature. The artist's respect for the environment shines through the paint, and becomes both a declaration of love and a desire for us all to respect the immense, commanding, yet inherently fragile oceans which surround us.