EMILY MASON

The paintings of Emily Mason are like vivacious rhapsodies, composed from luscious color orchestrations and graceful brushwork that together evidence the delightfully confident hand of a masterful artist. The sense of musicality hovers in Mason’s work with harmonies of color variety, interplay of values and tones, staccato line and bagatelles of brushy expanses, and syncopations between spans and bursts. In her handling of color all of that is present. And in her paintings color becomes, as Delacroix once described it, “music for the eyes.”

In some paintings, passages read like gentle meditations, others suggest exuberant reveries. In all of Mason’s painting, however, there is unmistakable testament to vivid imagination suffused with boundless energy. In her unambiguous embrace and vigorous handling of lucid color identities and relationships, there is recalled a kind of visual counterpart to the succinct and brisk cadence of poetry by Emily Dickinson, in whose lyrics the painter delights. The poet wrote memorably that “A word that breathes distinctly/Has not the power to die.” This thought applies similarly to the enduring vitality of Mason’s paintings that comes from the distinctiveness of her vibrant color rhythms and improvisational pictorial compositions.

Color itself is of course timeless and eternal. It is primal and attracts the eyes and takes possession of the senses. The experience of color has long been associated with and can activate a variety of emotions, from passion or joy to tranquility or melancholy. Color carries shared experience of feeling that transcends time or place but that experience of color does not require consensus as to a particular meaning. The orange-red of a painting like Fully Charged is apt to evoke the same feelings of strength and energy of a hundred years from now as it does today; its shades of magenta are likely to inspire the same sense of opulent mystery. Beyond that, specifics of any imagery are left to the viewer’s imagination.

In Mason’s work, color is the primary means by which her paintings are structured. Color is largely autonomous, without specific reference to literal objects. Its forms and shapes, veils and layers, darts and fouls ripple across her canvases and comprise singular argots of painterly sensibility and sensation. In her paintings, a push/pull between light and dark, thin and dense act as a perpetual energy generator keeping the work alive and full of constant enchantment. In looking at her work one is reminded that Matisse talked about color as being a powerful means of liberation and Roland Barthes called color a kind of bliss. Both freedom and joy abound in Mason’s paintings.

She often begins her paintings on the floor of her studio, working on all sides of it, reacting to evolving effects as colors interact and forms take shape. Her process typically involves applying oil paint of varying densities to the canvas using a variety of techniques that include brushing, pouring, and staining. Author David Ebony described Mason’s process in the book about her entitled Emily Mason: The Fifth Element:

Both additive and subtractive, her procedures mimic those of nature as a kind of artificial process of growth and regeneration. She uses thin washes or thick lines of paint, and often blots out large areas of pigment as a way of achieving luminosity. She concentrates on the physical properties of her materials, following, for example, the fluid qualities of the paint which, in the end, determine the richness and density of the surface. Layering and overlapping are among her principal techniques. These are key strategies of modernism.

In Mason’s work aspects of color activate feeling and conduct the eye and mind into realms of meditation and imagination. Sometimes the colors are assertive and scrappy, bursting with energy as with the vibrant tones of Fully Charged. Other times, as in Without the Words or Cutting Edge, they swoon in gentle seduction arrayed across the canvas like a siren song. Always her compositions grow from a sense of spontaneous intuition. They manifest the power of color to work magic on human emotion and come from the deepest recesses of Mason’s creative genius.

Many see in Mason’s work subtle evocations of being in nature and liken their own response to her work to that of observing the stunning beauty of a vibrant sunset or a lush landscape. About this aspect of her art Mason has said “My work, while never a depiction of nature, is analogous in its process to the workings of nature and, in its result, aims for the beauty of a great storm or a day lily. In Sea Swept, for example, only a modicum of disbelief need be suspended in order to perceive a view from a distant promontory, the orange and red areas becoming jetties extending into a tranquil bay of gentle blue gradation.

As with this work, Mason often uses shapes and colors as nouns of an intimate, personal visual language of nature that tempts recognition but resists it almost successfully. Her pictorial expression is more like poetry than narrative and blossoms into exquisitely indeterminate figurations of feelings for and experience of the natural world.

Clearly the artist immerses herself in the experience of nature, working in its verdant and hilly midst at her New England farm throughout the spring, summer and fall. Hers certainly is a creative imagination engaging constantly with the joyfulness of being in nature, fully capable of teasing out of the earth the mystical forces that reside there, imprinting them on canvas with the colors and arrangements of space that come forth from the collision of observation and feeling.

Her enchanting orchestrations provide constantly changing roles for colors and spatial expanses that, in combination, have the power to transport consciousness away from the concerns of everyday life, slow the quickness of perceived time, and open the consciousness to a sense of the sublime. There is a feeling of vital spontaneity in Mason’s abstractions that suffuses her work with engaging unpredictability and mystery that maintain its engaging sense of wonder. Invariably the work possesses a physical charm that imbues each painting with a unique personality.

Her work evokes essences of experience, both the observed and the imagined. It discards the arguably superfluous. Her alluring color compositions and improvisational structures can appear almost as secret gateways to the unknown, like seductive pathways of light, color and texture opening to notions of the eternal and the universal.

At its finest, one might argue that abstraction is a mode of vision enlivened by mystery. In Mason’s case, the mysterious is joyfully contained within her lyrical approach to forms and gestures. These she uses to tantalize and liberate the imagination with vagary and allusive possibility becoming the servants of enduring delight. To paraphrase what Emerson said about Pegasus, in a Mason painting “surprise and wonder always fly beside” it - and without them a painting could not be a Mason. Wrapped in surprise is the essential vitality - even ecstasy - that gives her paintings such emotional power and lasting gratification.

These qualities in Mason’s work activate the senses and delight the viewer no matter how often or how many times a painting is observed. Indeed, the experience of a work deepens and is enriched with time and repeated looking. A Mason painting can become a touchstone, full of allusions of beautiful places, activating pleasurable memories, and inspiring dreams of the future. Her distinctive brand of color abstractions has earned her a prominent place in the annals of American modernism. In her paintings there is a bit of magic that can make life better, enriched by beauty and enlivened by stimulation for eye and mind.