To find artist Mary Edna Fraser at work, look to the sky.
You might see her over the back country rivers and marshes of her native North Carolina, or above the sharply etched cliffs and coves of Maine, or the flat, wide beaches of Florida.
The renowned monotype and batik painter might also be aloft over the Colorado Rockies or the mesas of New Mexico. Or, for that matter, the Indiana Dunes, gazing from her open cockpit across the sun-bright, blue-green waters of Lake Michigan at the Chicago skyline. She’s flown low and slow over these and myriad other places – as much an artist in the midst of the creative process as Picasso laboring over his easel.
Invariably, she’s in the same antique aircraft, a 1946 Ercoupe 415-C that’s been in her family since her grandfather bought it new to fly from a grass strip next to his general store in Candor, N.C. Sometimes she’ll be at the controls; more often she’ll be a passenger, letting her brother or father pilot the plane while she leans out the open cockpit and concentrates her camera on the panorama below her.
“You can’t take pictures and fly at the same time,” Fraser said during a recent visit to the capital’s Smithsonian Institution, where she and 36 other women aviators are being honored this summer with an exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum.
Compared to the high-flying jetliners and purposeful business aircraft criss-crossing the skies above her, Fraser’s little Ercoupe chuffing along at 90 m.p.h. and between 500 and 1,000 feet seems an idle, wandering thing.
But she’s always in great earnest. Often what she sees below makes her very sad, because it is so fragile, and is being devoured by development.
That’s the reason for her art, which has been exhibited all over the world, including the American embassy in Thailand. One of her major pieces, a 6- by 19-foot batik painting of the South Carolina low country as seen from directly aloft, hangs in the main atrium of Charleston International Airport.
Another, of the Charleston harbor and coastline, is in the city’s main visitor center.
Whether mountain or mesa, broad river, ocean coast or Great Lakes shoreline, we tend to take our natural wonders for granted, and, when we visit them, see them only in glimpses.
Up in her open cockpit, Fraser can embrace them whole–visually and emotionally.
“It’s awe inspiring,” she said. “It gives you a sense of how small we are and how fragile our environment is. It’s a religious experience every time I fly.”
A disappearing landscape
With her art, she attempts to make us see what she sees, to understand the intensity and immensity of the natural beauty that is often so close at hand. But she wishes us to understand, too, that it can swiftly and irrevocably pass from our lives.
“I started doing this mostly because I was just interested in the aesthetic patterns,” she said, “but as I began to study the Earth’s surface, flying the East Coast of the United States, I was bothered by the fact that much of our wetlands are no longer natural. In some areas I could not get a beautiful earthscape out of my camera–because of the development.”
Though no area of the country has been spared, the building on barrier islands and the Florida coastline has been the worst, she said.
“Once my brother and I flew the Ercoupe from the Florida Keys back up to Charleston. I could get (camera) shots in the Keys and then I couldn’t get any more until I got up to Georgia because the development had altered the coastline. It was all little rectangles and squares instead of curving lines. That was a long time ago, in 1986. It hasn’t gotten any better.”
Though she often exhibits her photographs as artwork, she uses most of them as reference in making her paintings and prints. Trained in the arts programs of East Carolina University and the University of Tennessee, Fraser does monotypes, prints made by pressing paper against fresh paintings; and batik, a form of painting on cloth. Her batiks involve using dyes on silk.
Though she realistically interprets aerial views, the whole often resembles Oriental art and fantasies, thanks to the patterns made by the curves and spirals and shifting scallops of coastal rivers and shorelines, interspersed with brightly colored swaths of vegetation.
“I really don’t paint from the photos as visual memory,” Fraser said. “It’s more like a dreamscape.”
The National Air and Space Museum exhibition “Women in Flight,” which closes Sept. 12 and then begins a 30-city tour, is principally a photography show–some 75 images of female flyers by museum curator Carolyn Russo.
They’re extraordinary portraits–astronaut Shannon Lucid posed next to a Russian space sculpture; African-American airline captain Patrice Clarke-Washington of St. Charles, Ill.; Michelle Summers, who’s a seaplane pilot for an island-hopping airline in the Caribbean; the gutsy, feisty Patty Wagstaff, who left all manner of male pilots in the vapor becoming U.S. national aerobatic champion three years in a row.
But Fraser’s gentle face seems to stand out most of all–in part, no doubt, because of the romantic aspect of the open cockpit aviator’s helmet she wears in the picture, but also because of her eyes.
Pilots seem to see more than ordinary mortals.
Artists see more than that.
An Ercoupe in every garage
Fraser’s grandfather, Claude Burkhead, first took her up in the Ercoupe when she was two weeks old.
“He bought it for fun,” she said. “(When he purchased it) in 1946, they thought the Ercoupe was going to be a household item–that every house was going to have an Ercoupe. It was considered that type of airplane. We kept it in the family, and now it’s in the third generation.”
The family bases the plane in Apex, N.C., outside Raleigh, where Fraser’s brother, Claude Burkhead III, is an industrial engineer. Her father, Claude Burkhead, Jr., is a certified flight instructor in Columbus, N.C.
After college and art school, Fraser worked in an art gallery on Hilton Head Island, on the South Carolina coast near Savannah, Ga.–a geographical circumstance that led to the unique turn of her art.
“I was flying with my brother over the coast of Georgia one day, near Hilton Head, and looked down and saw the patterns that I call `islands from the sky’ now,” she said. “I decided I could take my art work — batik — up into the sky and have fun with my brother. We could go on adventures and I’d be making aerial perspectives of the land below, which was ever changing with altitude and season.”
That was in 1980. Since then, Fraser, 44, has made aerial artistic explorations of coastal Maine; Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard; Boston Harbor; the French seacoast; Lake Michigan along Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana; the Colorado and New Mexico Mountains; the Hudson River Valley; the Atlanta area; and the coasts of both Carolinas. She lives outside Charleston near a huge 350,000-acre wetlands preserve, embracing the Edisto Ashepoo and Combahee Rivers, that has figured largely in her work.
She attempted an aerial appreciation of the Delmarva peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic, but again, development made it impossible.
Next month, she’ll undertake another aerial art “adventure” with her brother, flying the Ercoupe up the Connecticut River through the center of New England.
“One thing all batik artists have in common is that they find it meditative,” she said. “It’s very slow as a medium. I spend many days working on my craft with the wax and dyes, thinking. How many people have a spot in their life to be slow and think. We don’t have that option much in our society.”
Not all her life is meditative. Married to Charleston pediatrician John Sperry, she has two daughters, Sarah and Rebecca. She is collaborating on a book called “A Celebration of Barrier Islands,” with Duke University geologist Orrin Pilkey, and another called “What the Water Gives Me,” with poet Marjory Wentworth.
Her work has had its terrifying moments.
“I was in the Keys with my brother and a storm blew in very rapidly,” she said. “I was looking down through the camera and looked up and it was black all around us. But there was still one little blue hole and we just flew through the hole and landed with a really hard crab (approach).”
Another time, while photographing the Appalachian Mountains near Asheville, N.C., the airplane’s engine started sputtering.
“I just looked at the pilot and he looked at me and he said we were going home and I said, `great idea.’ There were no airports in between and there were no flat areas to land in. As we were landing (at an Asheville airport) the prop quit.”
None of this drama, of course, is reflected in her aerial views. Hence, she reserves the right to pep things up. Using the bright colors of batik to “add emotion” to her work, Fraser has taken some other liberties with reality as well. In a panoramic painting she did of the Boston Harbor area, she took the buildings out of the foreground and rendered that portion of the work as natural marshland.
She’d like to do the same in a batik she plans of the Chicago skyline as seen in a photograph she took flying low over the Indiana Dunes.
“You have the city in the distance and the Great Lake to the right. It was really gorgeous. I was amazed.”
She’ll make it more so.
“I’ll leave the city skyline in,” she said. “But I’ll do the foreground in its undeveloped state.”
