An Artist Looks Behind The Veil

Top: Rebekah Fraser at the opening reception for Triangulations In The Natural World. Bottom: A detail of "Behind The Veil." Lucy Gellman Photos; all artwork by Rebekah Fraser.

The lines snake up the canvas, the colors of rust and early flower buds, summer and fall. They are certain, so round they seem rope-like and three dimensional. Around them, black speckles drip down in every direction, some leaving rainstorm-worthy streaks across the white plane. 

There are secrets here: a note, pinned to the canvas with a single earring, a line of imprecise stitching, ripped open, a bit of fabric that looks as if it could have been picked up from the ground. We could, it reads in neat lettering before the third word cuts off, folded over by a break in the surface.

"Behind The Veil" is the work of Rebekah L. Fraser, a Westville-based artist and writer whose solo exhibition, Triangulations In The Natural World, runs at the Woodbridge Town Library now through August 30. A collection of acrylic, water and mixed media on canvas, the show traces her development as an artist from 2019 to 2024, leaving plenty of room for close looking and meditation. 

The show is curated by Johnes Ruta, who viewers may know from his work with the Mitchell Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library. The Woodbridge Town Library is located at 10 Newtown Rd.; hours and more information are available here. 

"Sacred," 2019.

“The story in front of you is about connections between our internal and external landscapes, about vision and experience, the desire to control and the necessity of releasing one’s tight hold on the reins,” Fraser said at an opening reception last Thursday. “It’s about deception and truth, hiding and emergence, abuse, healing, and empowerment.” 

“With this show, I invite you to look behind the veil of your own beliefs, to interrogate your mind and release a little bit of what you perceive to be the controls you have in your life.”

Her journey to Triangulations In The Natural World begins in two places. The first is at Yale University, where Fraser minored in the history of art in the early 2000s before going into reporting, publishing and communications work. Then in her early 20s, she told herself that she would be a yoga teacher by the time she was 40, and an artist by the time she was 50. 

By 40, she’d achieved the goal of teaching yoga. Meanwhile, the thought of becoming an artist lived on a mental back burner, there as she wrote and published prolifically, and moved her life from small-town Massachusetts back to New Haven almost a decade ago. 

"Words Emerge from the Sea of Consciousness."

That, of course, is the second place this journey begins. When Fraser moved back to the Elm City in 2017, she met the painter and muralist Kwadwo Adae, who at the time was still teaching in a Chapel Street studio in downtown New Haven (his business, Adae Fine Art, has since moved to State Street). His style, which centers a student-led practice, resonated with her. 

“He taught me to express what I wanted to express in the way I wanted to express it,” she said Thursday. She later added that she admired, and soon picked up “how to produce undulating forms with a three-dimensional quality,” much like those that now adorn her canvas scrolls. 

 But it wasn’t until a retreat in Holland two years later, in 2019, that she began to focus deeply on her art. When she returned, she painted constantly, completing a new canvas every day for 40 days. Using water and acrylic paint, it became the foundation for her Control & Release series, a collection of large canvas scrolls that now live both in her home and in the exhibition.  

“I wanted to play with control and lack of control,” she said. Working with the canvases atop a table, she tried out different brushstrokes and lines, drip patterns and smudging, sometimes halving the canvas and pressing it to itself to create a kind of mirrored monoprint effect. She was enthralled with the practice, which became both meditation and ritual.

“My days had a rhythm, then,” she recalled at the opening, in remarks she later shared with the Arts Paper. “Arise, meditate, practice yoga, paint, go to work.”

"Untitled," 2024.

But canvas and paint gets costly: after 40 days, Fraser realized she had to slow down to make the practice sustainable. Each day, she still painted, but it was more gradual. “Let me just, like, make a line on the canvas,” she remembered saying to herself. 

At the end of 2019, she made peace with the idea that the series was done. She rang in the new year with her writing at the top of her mind. That year, and during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, she focused more on her writing, including multiple novels that she has since published. When she did paint, it became a mix of “surreal images that came to me during meditation,” abstracted eyes and faces, mountains and rolling hills. 

In one, a new painting titled "Erasure Emerging," a viewer can see the imprint of that period in real time. From a black background, a ghostly face emerges, the eyes wide open and brushed with a goldenrod yellow. Past the long, narrow suggestion of a nose, two lips part just slightly, the color of ripe pomegranate. A sheen of white paint covers it all, somehow thick and wispy all at once. 

“I thought I was done with the Control & Release series,” she said in her remarks Thursday. But the following year, a trip to Cobá and Tulum, Mexico convinced her otherwise. As she studied tantric philosophy and took in Cobá’s storied Mayan ruins, her mind crackled with the vivid colors of the surrounding landscape, the history that lived within it, and what it meant to witness and be among ruins. 

"Ruins," 2021.

In the exhibition, that change in her work appears most clearly along a back wall, where blues, pinks and greens run through a series of stretched canvases and acrylic on panel pieces. In one, a five-panel work titled "Ruins," lush mountains undulate beneath a swirling blue and pink sky, the sun sinking behind them at the far right. Above it, color dances and throbs on the wind; a peace falls over the landscape, like the darkness that will soon follow. 

In another, "Transmute Dark," Fraser returns to her Control & Release series, with a splatter and dripping of paint that resembles the cosmos, exploding across the velvet of a night sky.

In a third, "Words Emerge from the Sea of Consciousness," a swelling, white-and-blue wave occupies the center of the frame, the titular words scrawled across it in increasingly large letters. Up close, the words dance through and rise over the water, wiry and certain. But from afar, they disappear into the ocean, as if they too are riding the wave into the shore. 

In that sense, Fraser’s goal—of getting her viewers to look closely, and in so doing question reality as they know it—seems entirely possible as soon as a person enters the gallery, an intimate room tucked into the back of the library’s first floor. On one wall, her 2019 "Sacred" becomes a sort of welcome into the space, its black-and-white contours interrupted by a row of bright dots in the upper right corner. This is order and whimsy, binary and not.  

The longer one looks, the more details appear: faint, off-white circles that make the whole canvas seem like it is moving, smudges of black that become web-like where they have met water on canvas, threads of copper color that weave through the black. It’s a meditation in and of itself, just to stare at the work. 

In a small canvas beside it, the same, imprecise dots of color appear in a circle, a spray of rainbow in a sea of muted tones. Around them, fat lines of black paint swirl and smudge, broken only by drips and dribbles of gray that spread their watery marks across the canvas. Ripples and streaks of not-quite-color—beige and gray and off white—fill the canvas, making it feel full and quieted all at once. 

That, perhaps, is the greatest power of the work. To look—that is, to really look—is to take time to slow down, in a world otherwise obsessed with productivity. Fraser is no stranger to that world: she has taken the past few years to finish a graduate degree and publish multiple novels, including a series that folds climate disaster into romance. She’s prolific, with a daily writing and editing practice that also involves a rowing machine. 

And yet, these works show another side of her praxis, encouraging a viewer to meditate right along with them. It’s a gift, this reminder to slow down and ruminate. The library is the right place to do it: it welcomes a viewer with its quiet and cozy space, the gallery a sort of invitation. Now, it’s on a viewer to take it.