About the Painter

The book cover painting was commissioned by Stuart and Mary Banks in 1997 for Stuart’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Ann had walked up that hill with Barrie, Mary Banks and Stuart just weeks before the accident took her life.

The other paintings were sent as encouragement to the Knechtles after Ann’s death.

Barrie Fraser lives and works in East Lake Ainslie, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia  where he owns and operates the Kirkwood Studio and Gallery, and he regularly teaches evening and private art classes.

He has been a columnist writing on art and nature for The Inverness Oran for some twenty or so years and written and illustrated articles for The Nova Scotian and The Atlantic Advocate, and he has illustrated three Gaelic textbooks for the Gaelic College in St. Anne’s, Nova Scotia.

Fraser was commissioned by the Gaelic College in the 1990s to do a series of historical paintings and ink drawings. Those works, which were unveiled by the late Premier John Savage, are on permanent display in the Great Hall of the Clans at the Gaelic College in Cape Breton.

A native of East Lake Ainslie where he grew up on a small farm, Barrie Fraser then studied at the Nova Scotia College of Art in the late 1960s and early 1970s.