The Crooked Tree
- David Frazer

MELBOURNE ARTIST TALK
Saturday 13 April at 2pm

‘David Frazer has a particular talent in his immaculately worked, detailed relief prints and that is to create a world that is simultaneously fantastic and surreal, yet it possesses a tangible reality that we can inhabit through our imagination. Frazer’s prints have all the enchantment of an illuminated fairy tale, where fantasy has as much sway as the laws of nature and the human figure appears as slightly awkward and out of place in the natural setting. Although elements of the absurd are never far from the surface, many of his prints are like visual parables – a simple narrative that illustrates a deeper moral or philosophy.

The present series of prints, The Crooked Tree, stems from a collaboration between Frazer and the singer songwriter Tom Waits on an artist’s book More than Flesh and Bone. Waits relates an anecdote: “My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. ‘Why don’t you have a straight job like everyone else?’ they asked me the other day. I told them this story: In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, “Look at me…I’m tall, and I’m straight, and I’m handsome. Look at you…you’re all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you.” And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, “Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest.” So, the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.” -excerpt from the catalogue essay by Professor Sasha Grishin, AM FAHA, 2024