West Fraser’s coastal beauty here today, but gone tomorrow?

The handwriting is on the wall.

Actually, it’s not handwriting. It’s strokes of oil on canvas at the hand of Lowcountry artist West Fraser.

More than 30 years’ worth of his representational paintings of a place where saltwater, land and the struggles of mankind meet are compiled in a new book from the University of South Carolina Press, “Painting the Southern Coast: The Art of West Fraser.”

Our Beaufort historian Larry Rowland calls it “a Carolina classic.”

It portrays the best of times — when we stop to listen, smell and truly see the Lowcountry’s natural graces. We can muse in our air-conditioned sanctuaries at the book’s 260 works, and take advantage of Fraser’s eye and his hours of standing in nature with smoke fighting off the sand gnats.

And yet the book portends the worst of times — when a rising sea, or the insatiable thirst of man ruins the landscape by lining it with monumental homes, another dock or new autobahns over the rivers and what used to be woods.

“For a landscape painter, that’s a problem,” Fraser told me last week from his studio in Charleston.

And it mirrors the era of his family, which came from Hinesville, Ga., to timber Hilton Head Island in the mid-20th century and then try a new style of development with Sea Pines.

West Fraser arrived in the Lowcountry as a child not yet 10. He was cut loose on a wild island where his camping grounds would become Harbour Town, and his parents, the late Joseph Bacon “Joe” Fraser Jr. and Becky Fraser, labored with his aunt and uncle, Charles E. Fraser and Mary Stone Fraser, to bring sensitive yet successful development to a beautiful place.

Fraser’s new book features maps like his Uncle Charles loved so, the realism inspired by Hilton Head artists Coby Whitmore and Joe Bowler, and the natural beauty that was so appreciated by his grandmother Pearl Fraser, whose drawer full of crayons enabled the childhood artwork that would form a celebrated career.

Fraser’s whole life has been part of the yin and yang of mankind in the coastal environment. The handwriting on the wall is that changes to the landscape will not subside.

As Martha R. Severens writes in an introductory essay in the book, Fraser sees his role as a preservationist.

“I’m optimistic,” the artist told me, “though I think you can see in the book a certain amount of sadness.”

‘My country’

Fraser paints the aged Hilton Head shrimp trawler Rip Tide, up on the rail above Skull Creek.

His commissions have included documenting the raw land that would become Palmetto Bluff in Bluffton.

He takes us through the streets of Charleston, where corner groceries are as endangered as undisturbed scenery on the sea islands.

We walk the streets of the Gullah community of Lincolnville in St. Augustine, Fla., and feel the breeze on the Bay Street bluff in Beaufort.

We’re taken time again to the 1,880-acre Daws Island Heritage Preserve, an undisturbed place in Port Royal Sound that Fraser calls his muse. The book enables us to glide there on the boats he’s used to poke around the Southeastern coast, first the Hurricane Hugo-salvaged sailboat Sea Sisters named for his two daughters and their deceased older brother, then the motorboat Ocella that also enables Fraser’s love of fishing.

Fraser documents the back-breaking work of the Lowcountry’s struggling commercial seafood industry, showing us an old pickup truck by the McClellanville shrimp docks, and a rare glimpse of women shucking oysters at the Bluffton Oyster Co. on the May River.

In fact, prints of that painting will be sold to honor the women and other workers and help fund a new foundation Fraser has endowed to preserve the waterways and prolong the sustainable harvesting of seafood.

The book includes early watercolors on Daufuskie Island and Fraser’s evolution into a plein air painter with oils. Two introductory essays explain his techniques and place in the world of art.

Fraser shows where he’s coming from by including the entire poem by Sidney Lanier, “The Marshes of Glynn,” and a newer one by state poet laureate Marjory Wentworth.

Fraser and his wife, Charleston gallery owner Helena Fox, live in Mount Pleasant by the marshes of the Wando River. But they have a home on the northwest coast of Puerto Rico, where he has a new studio.

“As I grow old, I will have a place I can work uninterrupted and undisturbed.”

‘Shared passage’

Fraser will make a lot of local appearances this fall to sign and talk about the new book.

He thinks it’s a “pretty good record of the region” and his moment in it.

“It’s almost like a love tome for the place I am from,” he said.

And in his personal essay in the book, he tackles the handwriting on the Lowcountry’s wall that so many of us wrestle with.

He tells of romping with his brothers through woods where today the PGA Tour comes to play at the Harbour Town Golf Links in a tournament created by his family and now overseen by a nonprofit board originally chaired by his father, and now by his brother, Simon.

West Fraser paints a portrait of each year’s champion. It’s in his blood. But so is conservation, beauty, art and practicality.

“I once asked my father why he was ruining the forest,” Fraser writes, “and of course he gave me a practical answer — that land was to be used for monetary gain through development, not as a playground. I watched, and it affected me deeply as the forests I played in disappeared and the vista became crowded.

“My early contemplations then, about the natural world around me, molded my romantic spirit and conservationist philosophy as well the approach I take in painting. I am practical in my understanding of development in this land: the inevitability is clear, and I have respect for the insight and pioneering approach my father and his brother created as a development model.

“I believe, though, that the human role in living on earth is that of a shared passage, not an exclusive dominance.”

This story was originally published July 23, 2016 at 6:13 PM with the headline "West Fraser’s coastal beauty here today, but gone tomorrow?."