Emily Mason: Ripple Effect 2016

Emily Mason

Ripple Effect

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Emily Mason Ripple Effect

JUNE 10 - JULY 17.2016

LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com cover: South of the Border (detail), 2012, Oil on canvas, 44 1/8 x 36 in

Emily Mason Ripple Effect 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 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 furls 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.

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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.

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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 each 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 abstraction 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.

– Kenneth R. Marvel 4

Break of Day, 2014, Oil on canvas, 51 7/8 x 47 3/4 in

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On Coming, 2015, Oil on canvas, 52 x 44 in

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Cutting Edge, 2014, Oil on canvas, 22 x 26 1/4 in

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Without the Words, 2011, Oil on canvas, 26 x 24 in

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Presage, 2015, Oil on canvas, 42 1/4 x 36 in

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Fully Charged, 2014, Oil on canvas, 64 x 52 in

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System, 2016, Oil on canvas, 34 x 26 in

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Source Water, 2015, Oil on canvas, 20 x 28 in

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Betel Leaf, 1999, Oil on canvas, 60 x 62 in

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Hollow, 2015, Oil on canvas, 30 x 23 1/4 in

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Summer’s Seed, 2014, Oil on canvas, 34 x 26 in

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Eventide, 2014, Oil on canvas, 55 3/4 x 43 3/4 in

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Certain, 2007, Oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in

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Landfall, 2016, Oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in

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Choice, 2015, Oil on canvas, 20 x 28 in

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In Play, 2014, Oil on canvas, 50 x 31 1/4 in

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Depths of Garnet, 2012, Oil on canvas, 46 x 50 1/8 in

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Summer’s Promise, 2016, Oil on canvas, 58 x 52 in

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South of the Border, 2012, Oil on canvas, 44 1/8 x 36 in

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Vital Scarlet, 1978, Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in

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In Transit, 2014, Oil on canvas, 48 x 13 in

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Look Further On, 2012, Oil on canvas, 54 1/4 x 26 1/4 in

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Unknown to Possibility, 2012, Oil on canvas, 52 x 48 in

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Low Tide, 2015, Oil on canvas, 17 x 19 in

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Flight, 2015, Oil on canvas, 26 x 22 in

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Leaning Towards, 2015, Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in

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Parchment, 2015, Oil on canvas, 21 x 15 in

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Something Upper Wooing Us, 1999, Oil on canvas, 60 x 62 in

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Heated, 2015, Oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 26 1/8 in

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Woven Memories, 2012, Oil on canvas, 50 x 32 in

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Sea Swept, 2015, Oil on canvas, 14 x 28 in

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Winnowed, 2012, Oil on canvas, 68 x 52 in

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Subtitle, 2011, Oil on canvas, 54 x 36 in

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High Summer, 2014, Oil on canvas, 56 x 44 in

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Time’s Possibility, 2012, Oil on canvas, 44 x 36 in

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Sea Sound, 2016, Oil on canvas, 40 x 20 in

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Plausibility, 2012, Oil on canvas, 52 x 28 in

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Emily Mason

(b. 1932)

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2016 2015 2014

2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008

2007 2006 2005

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2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1995

1994 1993 1992 1991

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1982 1981 1978 1977 1976 1972 1970

1968 1962 1961

Ripple Effect, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Recent Paintings, David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY Opened Jars, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM Emily Mason: Works on Paper, David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY Recent Paintings, David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY Summer’s Response, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY Color Revelations, LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY Contemplating Color, LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM Contemplating Color, The Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY Directions, LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM Recent Paintings, David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY The Art of Emily Mason, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME Instinctive Color, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, Italy Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, CT David Findlay Jr Fine Art, New York, NY MB Modern, New York, NY Marian Graves Mugar Gallery, Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH Spheris Gallery, Walpole, NH MB Modern, New York, NY Spheris Gallery, Walpole, NH MB Modern, New York, NY Thomas Babeor Gallery, San Diego, CA Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT Thomas Babeor Gallery, San Diego, CA Walker-Kornbluth Gallery, Fair Lawn, NJ Marlboro College, Marlboro, VT Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY Aba Gallery, Lebanon, NJ Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI Webb and Parsons Gallery, Burlington, VT Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY Associated American Artists, New York, NY Kornbluth Gallery, Fair Lawn, NJ

Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY Wentz Gallery, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Hamilton Gallery, Charleston, SC Landmark Gallery, New York, NY Landmark Gallery, New York, NY Landmark Gallery, New York, NY Marlboro College, Marlboro, VT Gallery North, Setauket, New York, NY Dorothy Marvin Memorial Library, Windham College, Putney, VT Windham College, Putney, VT Area Gallery, New York, NY Area Gallery, New York, NY

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2005

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Three Generations of Abstract Painting: Alice Trumbull Mason, Emily Mason, Cecily Kahn, Hunter College, NY About Paint, Westport Arts Center, Westport, CT Kahn Mason Inaugural Exhibition, Beard and Weil Art Galleries, Wheaton College, Norton, MA Separate & Together: Wolf Kahn—Emily Mason, Mandeville Gallery, Union College, Schenectady, NY Robert Hull Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT All in a Family, New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT Works by Women Artists, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA American Academy of Arts and Letters 46th Annual Purchase Exhibition, NY American Women Artists—The Twentieth Century, Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN Alice Trumbull Mason / Emily Mason: Two Generations of Abstract Painting, Newcomb College, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; Washburn Gallery, NY; Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY Two Artists, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT A First Selection of Young Italian and American Artists: Festival of Two Worlds, Galleria d’Arte Moderna de Spoleto, Spoleto, Italy

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com Š 2016 LewAllen Contemporary LLC Artwork Š Emily Mason