Another Frazier Shapes a Sculpting Career: A Chip Off The Old Block
By Lynn Bretz
Like father, like son. And for tales about the truisms and ironies in that cliche, local artist-teacher Matthew Frazier is a good source.
Matt, like his famous father Bernard "Poco" Frazier, is a sculptor. And like his younger brother Malcolm, Matt inherited an unfinished sculptural project when his father dies followeing a heart attack in May 1976. Poco Frazier, in 1929, was the first graduate of the KAnsas University Department of Design; he won seven top awards in national and international competitions and completed more than 30 major commissioned sculptures.
"My father was up to his ears in three different sculptural projects when he died," the 37-year-old Frazier said last week as he began the tale of his legacy -- the fiberglass sculpture, "Pioneer City of Hays" he completed in December for the Kansas town.
Brother Malcolm complete the other two projects, the "Justice" sculpture in the new Kansas Supreme Court building in Topeka and one of the Spanish explorer Coronado for the town of Liberal.
"The sculpture I did was a commission given to my father, before he died, by Southwestern Bell (Telephone Co.) to commemorate the pioneer days of Fort Hays," the bearded, oldest of three sons of Poco said. "They (Southwestern Bell) contacted the family and asked if one of us could complete it."
So for six months, Matt and other family members sifted through the odds and ends searching for models and plans for the three commissions. they combed through the prodigious heap of materials and works left from Poco's sculptural career that spanned more than 30 years.
"My father left something short of a junkyard of things," Matt laughed as he recalled, "and he had storage all over town. It was stuff he'd borrowed, found, bought..."
But Matt never found what he was looking for. So he drew from his own ideas and instincts, shaped by impressions from his father.
"I decided I would incorporate into their (Hays') sculpture features and motifs my father would have used," Matt said. "They're an innate part of me, something I've grown up with but now they're just as much a part of me and my own ideas."
Matt talks freely and at length about his father's approach to sculpture. His Lawrence home contains several of Poco's models and some old, small-scale projects. The sculptures, many of them slender ascendant human forms, have that glimmer of kinship, just as the talkative Matt, standing before clay models in his kitche, recalls photos of Poco posing with some half-finished sculpture.
MAtt is currently working on a "female figure in flight concept," using ideas cast from a father-son meld.
But for Hays, Matt designed a panel 18 feet long, 6 feet high, and with a thickness no greater than 10 inches. It depicts Hays' landmark intersection of 10th and Fort streets in the year 1871, a year signalling Hays' emergence as a maturing community following its wild-wild-West adolescence in the 1860s.
"In the early days, Hays -- it was the last outpost on the railroad (line) to Denver and a stopover for cattle drivers -- was truly a boomtown," the sculptor explained. "It (the city) was saloons and whorehouses, a get-rich-quick place. But in 1871 it settled down as a pioneer community with hotels, a barbership...and other businesses moved onto its commercial artery. I wanted to capture tha sense of arrival and growth."
Using photographs from the Ellis County Historical Society, Matt reconstructed a scene that's historically accurate, he says, but is still sculptural. The subject matter protrudes out of a concave background, a technique, Matt says, his father frequently used in sculptural panels like the one he designed for KU's Campanile doors.
"There is a sense of distortion of the images because the subject matter is made to appear as a convex exteriour of the sculpture," Matt pointed out. "The background is deliberately bland and is essentially a frame, but the sculptural shapes tha emerge from it would look hideous without it."
Places of business are identified by telltale signes like benches and barbarpoles.
"To enliven the sculpture I added life symbols that would reflect human presence without actually depicting people."
A doctor's covered surrey "or something that a nicely dressed lady would drive" that sits in the foreground waiting for its driver also symbolizes Hays' new-found gentility.
Matt's elation over his complete Hays sculpture - his first commission - has spurred thoughts of shaping his own career as a sculptor. His "almost done" master's degree in special education at Kansas University, a job teaching handicapped elementary school children, a lust for kayak building and other trades belie Matt's "growing addiction to sculpture."
"He (Poco) never pushed any of us (children) into sculpture and we've all kind of foundered in some way," Matt said, quickly qualifying "floundering" as sidesteps through other life experiences that gave him, his brothers and sisters a maturity that's often difficult for children of successful parents to attain.
Matt's path to sculpting in Lawrence has been a circuitous one. Poco and Matt's mother Franczeska divorced when Matt was only a year old. Matt, his sister Sharon and mother, a talented illustrator and sculptor in her own right, moved to Washington, D.C. But Matt spent junior high and college years in Lawrence with his father. Among Poco Frazier's first family and that was created by his second marriage, (children Bernard, Malcolm and Arvella), "there's nobody who's not an artist or a teacher of art."
But Matt's attraction to the life of a sculptor has been honed gradually.
"My father was awe-inspiring." Matt said. "When I first started helping him with projects - I was 13 when Dad was working on the Jefferson City state office building sculpture -- at first it was like running off to teh circus.
"But as I got older, I began to perceive working with my father as more 'a job I had to do.' My father was pretty uncompromising. If you were around him, he expected (from you) a bit of scrifice to his efforst. If you didn't want to be around that pressure, you got away from it," Matt summarized, noting that at times he did just that, even though he knew "thousands of people would've died to be doing what we (the family) were doing."
So Matt says he "got more skeptical (about a sculptor's life) and realized the trials and tribulations my father continually went through."
To work on a sculptural piece, especially the many large-scale piece Poco built, is to become totally absorbed, Matt says, even to the point of exclusion of others.
"He was often broke, okay? Raising a family was a trial because the breadwinner was totally devoted to his art," Matt recalled. "His family needs often came second. There were just a lot of conflicts about that...Don't misunderstand me, I feel very warmly towards my father.
"Poco was a mighty 5-foot-5," his son said. "If ever there was a cock-of-the-roost fellow, it was my father. He was quite a charmer. He had a tremendous social presence. It was not an easy life he carried out for himself.
"Now that I'm hoping to do more commissions, I wonder why I'm becoming so willing to take on that life, too. It almost seems scary."
Lawrence Journal-World, Lawrence, Kansas, March 9, 1980