Born in Canberra, Australia in 1961 and raised in Hamilton, New
Zealand, Neil Frazer is one of New Zealand's foremost painters.
Frazer graduated from the Ilam School of Fine Arts in Christchurch
in 1984, before commencing a successful career in the New Zealand
and international art scene.
Frazer's paintings speak passionately of the relationship
between the artist and the painting process itself. The thickly
applied oil paint is alive, mobile and vibrant; he restricts his
means to pure pigment, pure form, and pure colour and makes no call
upon the image or the structural geometry of picture making.
Frazer utilises the properties of paint, the canvas and
the processes of painting as a composer calls upon the rhythms,
cadences and pure sound of music to assemble works which excite the
mind, the imagination and the emotions.
Frazer's first solo exhibition was in Christchurch in 1984, and
since then has exhibited regularly, both nationally and
internationally. He has been the recipient of a number of awards,
among them a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant in 1986, which
enabled him to travel to the USA where he undertook postgraduate
studies at the New York Studio School of Drawing in Painting and
Sculpture.