Dwellings

Carol Hoorn Fraser, MFA, RCA (1930-1991) was a beautiful and unique American-born artist, who received a humanistic art education at the University of Minnesota, took first prizes in shows at the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and lived for thirty years in Nova Scotia with her husband John, with stays in Provence and Mexico.


Like Sinatra, she did it her way, radically rethinking her popular expressionist style in the mid-Sixties and developing a decisive organicist iconography in oils that was all her own. Subsequently, when asthma became a problem, she embarked on a brilliant series of watercolours, returning to oils shortly before her death.


In Tepoztlán in 1981 she dripped undiluted watercolours onto a sheet of glass, pressed sheets of drawing paper down on it, and worked up the resulting colour patches into images. Back home she began revealing the poetry of houses embedded in nature in the various seasons, with the boundaries between inner and outer often porous. These are indeed Dwellings. The variety of techniques by which she made these thirty watercolours sing are illuminated in a long Afterword by artist Barbara Bickle. 


Her work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.