For Fraser

My friend of many years, the painter Fraser McIver, died suddenly and unexpectedly a week ago today at 59. In shock, I spent some time reading through the hundreds of emails and texts we'd exchanged over the years, and in the most recent from a few months ago he'd invited me — again — to spend some time with him drawing and painting together at his studio, a magical, off-the-grid place he'd created in a converted caravan on the banks of the Crinan Canal in Argyll, Scotland. I answered, as I always did, "Someday", or words to that effect, and this time he warned — chillingly in retrospect — that time might not be on our side. I took that as a middle-age rumination, the kind of thing I'm prone to myself at 56, but maybe he knew, suspected, or just wasn't feeling well... I don't know.

When I heard the news, I reacted as I usually do to such things — by grabbing something and beginning to draw or paint, this time scribbling my own face on a fine sheet of Ingres paper, crumpling it up, ironing it flat, stitching it to watercolor paper with red thread, and working the resulting 'collage' aggressively with oil pastel. Fraser would have liked this one, I think, or at least he would have had something interesting and challenging to say about it, something that made me understand my own work in a different light and context, as he always did.

"Crumpled Self-Portrait (for Fraser)"
https://www.philipgladstonestudio.com/pg-studio-store/Sketches-and-Studies-c36205850