MABEL PEARL FRAZER

Born in West Jordan, Utah, this interesting artist and teacher grew up in Beaver, Utah, where her father, Thomas Frazer (q.v.), was an outstanding stonemason, builder, and poet. An art student at the University of Utah and the Art Students League, Frazer became a mainstay on the U of U faculty from 1921 to 1953. At the height of her powers, this imaginative oil painter and watercolorist created several canvases and works on paper possessed of authentic and simple strength of color and form. Essentially a tonalist-modernist interested in both figurative and landscape subjects, Frazer often expressed visionary and spiritualist themes, sometimes done awkwardly but always interestingly within a kind of "stylistic warp," for example, between the late romanticism of an Albert Pinkham Ryder and various, almost postimpressionist, solutions. (b. December 28)

Olpin, Robert S., William C. Seifrit, and Vern G. Swanson. ARTISTS OF UTAH. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1999: 103.