Emily Mason by Miles McEnery Gallery

EMILY MASON

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

‘That Magical Thing’: The Poetry of Emily Mason By Elisa Wouk Almino

When Emily Mason was twelve years old, her mother gave her a book of poems by Emily Dickinson. Thereafter, it rarely left her side. Mason was named after the poet (as well as after her grandmother), and she has been reading Dickinson’s poems since her teenage years. Mason considers them to be one of the greatest influences on her life. In a recent phone call, she said of Dickinson, “Her cadence, her observation of nature corresponds to the way I paint somehow. I’m not quite sure how.” She happened to have a book of Dickinson’s poems within arm’s reach, for moments later she was reading “She Sweeps with Many-Colored Brooms”: She sweeps with many-colored Brooms — And leaves the Shreds behind — Oh, Housewife in the Evening West — Come back, and dust the Pond! You dropped a Purple Ravelling in — You dropped an Amber thread — And now you’ve littered all the East With Duds of Emerald! And still, she plies her spotted Brooms, And still the Aprons fly, Till Brooms fade softly into stars — And then I come away —

Mason’s paintings are like Dickinson’s brooms sweeping the sky with “duds of emerald”— pure color in motion. We move between reds and blues, which take us from day to night and back to day again. Mason’s paintings, such as “Head Land” (2018) and “Look Back” (2018), are like fragments or snapshots of some other sky. (The paintings seem to be expanding, like the universe.) Her vibrant colors have been likened to Pierre Bonnard’s, while her misty atmospheres are reminiscent of J. M. W. Turner’s. In Mason’s abstract paintings, the viewer’s mind inevitably searches for a story or subject. The titles guide us: “Summer’s Ember,” “Dew Drop,” “Embraced.” According to Mason, the titles always come after she completes a picture. Some are borrowed from Dickinson’s poems, like “Stillness Is Volcanic” and “Secreted in a Star.” But the paintings are not depictions of things referenced in the titles; rather, it’s as if the subjects of the titles have discovered their existence, their coming into being, through the paint.

There is something mystical about Mason’s paintings. “Often I’ll keep a painting around … until there’s one more twist to add,” she said in a recent interview. “It’s that extra twist, that extra thought, that extra dimension … that magical thing you can’t predict.”1 She follows her instincts—as she freely allows her pools of paint to slide around the canvas, tipping it side to side with her hands, capturing the otherworldly yet elemental quality, “that magical thing,” without quite knowing how. Mason’s paintings, like Dickinson’s poems, can feel both transcendent and enormously appealing to our earthly senses. Just as Dickinson’s poems move swiftly from a blade of grass to the unknowable heavens, Mason’s paintings take us from the hint of a bird, road, or harbor to profound and wordless fields of color. When I read Dickinson’s poems with Mason’s art in mind, they have the effect of opening up her paintings—giving me the language to talk about them. Paradoxically, the poems also illuminate how paint is as clearly a language as words. “Bring me the sunset in a cup,” Dickinson writes.2 And Mason does: the pink and red inching down the canvas toward us in “Sunset Lake” (2011). Abstract, impalpable elements in

nature become highly physical in both of their works, sparking the desire in all of us to touch and hold such things as light and color. “Oozed so, in crimson bubbles / Day’s departing tide – / Blooming – tripping – flowing.”3 These exquisite lines by Dickinson could describe the action taking place in any number of Mason’s paintings. Their flares of red, bands of yellow, and tumbling shapes are like Dickinson’s “blazing,” “leaping” sun or her June sky and its “blue and gold mistake.”4 Of course, Mason and Dickinson also share a passion for nature. Both of their works are constantly referencing the cycles of the seasons—how “springs from winter rise.”5 “I really rely on seeing nature,” Mason said to me. While she grew up in New York City and has spent most of her life there, she has always found her grounding and inspiration in the outdoors. One can find early glimpses of this in her letters to her mother, the artist Alice Trumbull Mason, for whom nature was also essential and whose abstract paintings similarly allude to weather and landscapes. “We saw spring come on all in one trip,” Emily Mason wrote in March 1957, describing a trip she took from Venice to Tuscany and Umbria, “with the lush fields of wheat first a green fuzz to a thick carpet just outside of Roma ... also saw the fruit trees all white and pink with blossoms and sprayed a bright theatrical blue.” She had been living in Venice at the time with the artist Wolf Kahn, whom she would later marry. She was there on a Fulbright, staying from 1956–58 and falling in love with Venice, which she described in another letter as “more blue and beautiful each new day”—a color that pervades so many of her paintings. Reading Mason’s letters is a pleasure—they are another kind of poetry that illuminates her painting. One wonders if she could have taken up poetry as her mother did. Alice Mason, in addition to being a key member of the American Abstract Artists group, wrote abstract poems that chased the ephemeral ways of nature: observing how “gliding green grass ripples off” or how “the sky / has fled,” and beholding the “amazing brilliance of flowers / flashing.”6 (It is no coincidence that she gave her daughter a book of Dickinson’s poems.) In “Abstract Writing Dated 1935,” Alice Mason watches birds flying off of the trees:

one fell just now now three fell four just five fell three fell in unison in season to exaggerate the dark short close quick bright brown bright green bright hot hot torpid insipid and tepid The poem evokes the clashing colors and simultaneous, contradictory movements in her daughter’s paintings, which seem to capture something in flight, like the scattering of pink, red, and white in “Snow Dust” (2018) and the shooting shafts in “Taos” (2018). When I asked Mason who her artistic influences have been, her mother was her first answer. However, despite their shared attachment to nature and preference for abstract art, their approach to painting couldn’t be more different. Alice planned her every move—making precise preparatory drawings for all her paintings. Emily lets go of control and trusts the paint, in her words, to “suggest the next step.”7

Mason’s paintings, like elements in nature—an unpredictable wind or gliding, amorphous cloud—have a mind of their own. Both her husband, Wolf Kahn, and the late artist and critic Robert Berlind have compared Mason’s painting to “the way a bird sings.”8 Or, as Mason herself puts it, “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 the interior of a great storm or a day lily.”9 Just as you might be caught off guard by the flutter of a butterfly or the shadow of a cloud, the same sense of surprise happens when Mason unleashes her paints onto the canvas. And while we behold the final, seemingly still, result, it’s as though you could see the colors flash and wash over one another in real time. For, as she puts it, “when you look at a painting, you recreate the painting experience itself.”10 Mason is steadfast in her approach. At Hunter College, where she taught painting for over thirty years, she instructed her students to avoid planning ahead. “Intuition,” she has said, “makes you articulate things you might never have thought. I want to clear my mind when I start a painting. It’s what John Cage called ‘getting rid of intention.’”11 Besides echoing Cage, who was a friend of her mother’s, Mason embraces a subjective

relationship to paint that was espoused by the Abstract Expressionists. She, like them, has always wanted the paint to do the talking. But, as many critics have observed, Mason doesn’t neatly fall into any one movement. In the words of the gallery director Louis Newman, “She was the perfect counterpoint, if you will, to that macho boy’s club”—i.e., Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Josef Albers, and Clyfford Still, among others.12 Her work feels subtler than theirs, of a looser tempo. Above all, it is uniquely luminous. Ever since her early days as an artist at Bennington College and at Cooper Union, Mason has followed her own rhythms, observing whatever arose from her own, specific intuition. She likes to say that she wants each of her paintings to take her someplace new, where she has never been before. And her paintings are, quite palpably, places, each an environment with its own temperature, climate, and landscape. “I cannot name them, but know intuitively when they appear,” Mason has said.13 While poetry might give us the words to talk about n her paintings, they transport us to places that have yet to be described. Endnotes 1. Dick Kagan, “High Color: The Art of Emily Mason,” Hyland, May 1, 2013. 2. Emily Dickinson, “Fascicle Six, Sheet Two” (c. early 1860) in Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them, ed. Cristanne Miller. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). 3. Emily Dickinson. “Fascicle One, Sheet Three” (c. summer 1858). 4. Emily Dickinson, “Fascicle Thirteen, Sheet Four” (c. early 1862) and “Fascicle Six, Sheet Three” (c. late 1859). 5. Emily Dickinson, “Fascicle Seven, Sheet Three” (c. early 1860). 6. Alice Trumbull Mason, “Certain Few Leaves” (nd), “I Write at Midnight” (nd), and “The Moment Being” (1928), from the archives of Alice Trumbull Mason. 7. Emily Mason: A Painting Experience, directed by Rafael Salazar Moreno (Brooklyn, NY: RAVA Films, 2017). 8. Robert Berlind, “Foreword” in David Ebony, Emily Mason: The Fifth Element (New York: George Braziller, 2006). 9. Ani Boyajian, ed., Emily Mason: The Light in Spring, essays by David Ebony and Christina Weyl (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2015). 10. Emily Mason: A Painting Experience, directed by Rafael Salazar Moreno. 11. Kagan, Dick. “High Color: The Art of Emily Mason,” Hyland, May 1, 2013. 12. Emily Mason: A Painting Experience, directed by Rafael Salazar Moreno. 13. “Biography,” Emilymasonstudio.com. Elisa Wouk Almino is a writer, editor, and translator based in Los Angeles. She is currently a senior editor at Hyperallergic, managing its West Coast coverage. She is also the editor of a monograph on the artist Alice Trumbull Mason, to be published by Rizzoli in the fall of 2019.

Snow Dust

Blown In

Look Back

Thin Ice

Head Land

Reverse Direction

Ocean Fault

Sea Life

Went to Sea

A Rising Tide

Taos

Arch

From Space

Prelude

The Wind Doth Blow

Sweet Grass

Just Reward

Summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Harvest

Inner Most

Arc de Triomphe

Release

Accounting

Night Fall

Before the Fall

Down Draft

Plate List

page 9 Snow Dust, 2018 Oil on canvas 24 1/8 x 28 inches 61.3 x 71.1 cm page 11 Blown In, 2018 Oil on canvas 52 x 42 inches 132.1 x 106.7 cm

page 13 Look Back, 2018 Oil on canvas 22 x 36 inches 55.9 x 91.4 cm page 15 Thin Ice, 2018 Oil on canvas 56 x 52 inches 142.2 x 132.1 cm page 17 Head Land, 2018 Oil on canvas 32 x 24 inches 81.3 x 61 cm

page 19 Reverse Direction, 2018 Oil on canvas 44 x 36 inches 111.8 x 91.4 cm

page 27 A Rising Tide, 2018 Oil on canvas 40 x 36 inches 101.6 x 91.4 cm

page 21 Ocean Fault, 2018 Oil on canvas 24 x 20 inches 61 x 50.8 cm

page 29 Taos, 2018 Oil on canvas 32 x 20 inches 81.3 x 50.8 cm

page 23 Sea Life, 2018 Oil on canvas 28 x 20 inches 71.1 x 50.8 cm

page 31 Arch, 2018 Oil on canvas 52 x 54 inches 132.1 x 137.2 cm

page 25 Went to Sea, 2018 Oil on canvas 28 x 22 inches 71.1 x 55.9 cm

page 33 From Space, 2018 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches 76.2 x 61 cm

page 35 Prelude, 2018 Oil on canvas 34 x 24 inches 86.4 x 61 cm

page 43 Summerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Harvest, 2018 Oil on canvas 70 x 52 inches 177.8 x 132.1 cm

page 51 Accounting, 2018 Oil on canvas 34 x 24 inches 86.4 x 61 cm

page 37 The Wind Doth Blow, 2018 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches 61 x 76.2 cm

page 45 Inner Most, 2018 Oil on canvas 54 x 52 inches 137.2 x 132.1 cm

page 53 Night Fall, 2018 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches 76.2 x 61 cm

page 39 Sweet Grass, 2018 Oil on canvas 40 x 36 inches 101.6 x 91.4 cm

page 47 Arc de Triomphe, 2018 Oil on canvas 52 x 46 inches 132.1 x 116.8 cm

page 55 Before the Fall, 2018 Oil on canvas 36 x 40 inches 91.4 x 101.6 cm

page 41 Just Reward, 2018 Oil on canvas 44 x 36 inches 111.8 x 91.4 cm

page 49 Release, 2018 Oil on canvas 43 1/4 x 35 1/2 inches 109.9 x 90.2 cm

page 57 Down Draft, 2018 Oil on canvas 28 x 24 inches 71.1 x 61 cm

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

EMILY MASON 3 January – 2 February 2019

Miles McEnery Gallery 525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2018 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2018 Elisa Wouk Almino 60 Photography by Christopher Burke Studio, New York, NY Joshua Farr, Brattleboro, VT Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-1-949327-04-5 Cover: Inner Most (detail), 2018

MILES M c E N E RY G A L L E RY