We warmly invite you to the exhibition and book launch of All at Sea
5:30pm Thursday 31st July - 255 Hardy Street, Nelson

Paintings by Neil Frazer
Photographs by Craig Potton

Both artists will attend the opening (an excellent chance to have your copy of the book signed!)

31 July - 21 August 2025

In this upcoming exhibition and book launch Craig Potton joins his friend the wonderful expressionist artist Neil Frazer in producing works of homage to our very own ocean and coast which we love and recreate in.

Back in 2022 Craig and Neil visited the Golden Bay and Punakaiki coastlines together to bring you this stunning exhibition and book. Witness a concurrence of vision in painting, photography and words.

These are gifts of art for Nelsonians' who love the sea and our coast.


NEIL FRAZER

Neil Frazer is a seventh generation New Zealander who was born in Canberra, Australia in 1961. He completed a BFA at Canterbury University in Christchurch before studying in painting at The New York Studio School on a Fulbright scholarship. Frazer received the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago, Dunedin in 1993, and was an artist in residence at the Victoria College of the Arts in Victoria, Australia in 1994. In 1999 Frazer moved to Sydney, Australia to complete an MFA in painting at the University of New South Wales.
Frazer is represented in major public and private collections in New Zealand and Australia. He is a painter whose large gestural works celebrate the power and drama of the natural world without reference to human intervention. He travels within and throughout the landscapes he paints in order to experience, gather and absorb its grandeur.


CRAIG POTTON

Craig Potton is New Zealand’s best known landscape photographer and an ardent conservationist. In pursuit of his photography he has tramped and climbed extensively in New Zealand, its sub-Antarctic Islands, the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, the Nepal Himalaya, and more recently Poland, India and Iceland. For more than four decades he has documented the New Zealand wilderness, exploring relationships between the concept of artistic beauty and wilderness in the natural world.

Craig started Craig Potton Publishing in 1987 and has had many of his own titles published, including New Zealand Aotearoa, one of New Zealand’s best-selling pictorial titles, Classic Walks of New Zealand, The Nature of Things, Moment and Memory, Offerings from Nepal and Here on Earth were all Montana New Zealand Book Award finalists in their publication year. More recently he has produced a major work New Zealand ‘s Wilderness Heritage and a large scale art book of his landscape photography, New Zealand.

He has worked as a Location/Stills Photographer on The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Peter Pan and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe motion pictures. His photographic reputation continues to grow, with exhibitions at Christchurch Art Gallery, National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and a major retrospective at the Rowe Gallery, North Carolina, USA and Luksfera Gallery in Poland and Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. Craig has also conceived, screen-written and presented two New Zealand documentary series, Rivers (2010) and Wild Coasts (2011). At the 2011 New Zealand Scriptwriters Awards he won Best Documentary Script for his episode ‘Rangitata’.

Craig is an Ambassador for the New Zealand Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society and is actively involved in the New Zealand Green Party. He makes his home in Nelson and opened his own Gallery Store in Nelson in September 2013.

“A good photo can sometimes be an arrow to the heart of things, alluding to or eliciting an immediate encounter. It is the nature of art and the way of nature to push us beyond the narrow realities we often become trapped in, to new or forgotten realms of pleasure.” Craig Potton, Moment and Memory.