1/17/2024 0 Comments Girl on horse sketchEverything I learned I brought home to practice, practice and practice. “COVID shut us down after a few times but I learned a lot from listening to Dave and watching what he did so effortlessly. Prior to COVID, an artist friend, Astrid Rankin, convinced him to attend a painting group hosted by Pictou artist Dave MacIntosh. With drawing you are working in greys only, so I have so much to learn about painting.” “For whatever reason, watercolours did not interest me, pastels were just OK, but I am enjoying oil painting. In recent years, he has turned his hand to oil painting, something he only dabbled with 15 years previously. I love the character lines, the way the light and shadows fall on their faces.” Artist James Fraser approached a local homeless man and asked permission to draw him, partly because he found his face interesting and partly because he wanted to experiment with drawing his beard. “The faces of fishermen and farmers, people who spent their years working outside, those faces have stories ingrained in them. Rosalie MacEachernįraser, who accepts commissions for a variety of work, still enjoys drawing elderly faces. Better the grant went to someone who really needed it.” Inspired by a Shaun Whalen photograph of a Great Blue Heron, Fraser painted the majestic bird, capturing the way the light danced off its wings, creating various shades of blue. “I realized I didn’t need the grant because I got to do what I wanted. He did not bother reapplying for the arts grant. Working from my impressions and her photographs, I drew all six very different faces.” She had a wonderful way of getting them to talk and I watched how their faces changed as they spoke. I got my friend Lacey Morrell, who is an amazing photographer, to take their photos. “I met with them and got to know them a little. Eventually, he drew six of the veterans, all now deceased. They were residents of the veterans’ wing at Sutherland Harris Memorial in Pictou and after talking to the administrator, Fraser expressed his interest in doing their portraits. I knew they were people I wanted to draw.” “A group of elderly people came in and I could not stop looking at their faces. Those comments were still drifting through Fraser’s mind a few days later while he was drawing at a coffee shop. The gentleman who called seemed to be making a point about my lack of formal training, but he also said nobody gets accepted on the first application.” A still life painting which Fraser values more for the learning it represents than its image. “I didn’t get the grant, but I did get a phone call that I found both encouraging and discouraging. Rosalie MacEachernĪt the urging of a friend, Fraser once applied to a provincial arts organization for a grant to draw a collection of elderly people. Fraser was attracted to the original photograph by the details of the girl’s hair and dress. In a young person, that’s generally not too difficult but in an older person, it is much more challenging.” James Fraser’s pencil drawing of a serious young girl in an elaborate dress. “You have to get the eyes, the nose, the lips, the shape of the face and the hair right. I guess I didn’t have the right personality to be a student at the time and I haven’t changed that much, though I certainly learn from others.”įraser has always enjoyed the challenges of portraiture. I can see some merit in that today, but I was just a young guy who loved to draw and I wanted to do it my way. “I was told my work was good but instructors would have to strip it down and teach me proper methods and techniques. “Drawing pencils, sketch pads, oil paints, it was all new to me, but it was a fantastic sight,” he said.Ī few years later, a teacher who was convinced he had talent, arranged for Fraser to show samples of his work to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, with a view to enrolling. Then he told me about a shop downtown where you could buy art supplies.”Ī few days later, Fraser paid his first visit to a stationary shop, HL White. He couldn’t get the faces right, so he asked me to try Boy George. “I think the business was called Weekends and he was drawing Boy George and Michael Jackson on mirrors. Rosalie MacEachernĪs he got older, he knew a young guy who had a job drawing on mirrors at a small shop in the Highland Square Mall. Fraser says one of the challenges for local artists is finding models and he sometimes has to purchase online images. James Fraser’s portrait of an elderly woman staring into eternity is a work in progress. “My older brothers were into rock and roll music and I used to take the white sleeves from inside album covers and draw on every inch of them,” he said. There were no memorable art pieces in his childhood home, nor was there any supply of drawing materials and even unlined paper was scarce, but he covered scraps of paper, scribblers and textbooks with faces and figures.
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