Unfolding with intense hues and bold tones, Emily Mason’s paintings bridge the movements of Color Field and Lyrical Abstraction. Mason poured life onto canvas, creating countless numbers of undeniably beautiful, color-centric abstract compositions in paint throughout the many decades of her distinguished career.
Mason’s mother, Alice Trumbull Mason, was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group. Through her mother, Mason enjoyed childhood encounters with artists Piet Mondrian and Joan Miró, exposing her to the vanguard of early abstract movements. Coming into her own in the 1950s, Mason ventured away from those early influences, developing her lyrical and fluid style. While joining like-minded artists who filled their canvases with fields of color and abstract forms, Mason's process was very personal. In a 2005 interview she compared it to a game of chess.
Her method was not to plan out a painting in advance, but to start working and see where it took her. She might begin by laying a blank canvas on the floor, pouring paint on it from a tin (she sometimes recycled cat food containers for this purpose), tilting the canvas to and fro to let the paint run about, then adding colors, eventually setting it aside and resuming work later. It was a process, she liked to say, of “letting a painting talk to you.”
Born and raised in New York City, Mason studied at Bennington College and graduated from The Cooper Union School. In 1956 she received a Fulbright grant and spent two formative years in Italy where she studied at the Accademia Delle Belle Arti in Venice. Mason’s first solo exhibition was in 1960 at the Area Gallery in New York City, after which she continued to exhibit frequently nationally and internationally. The National Academy awarded her the Ranger Fund Purchase Prize in 1979 and, for more than thirty years, has taught painting at Hunter College. Mason enjoyed a distinctive and celebrated career, spanning the development of American Abstract painting. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections, including the National Academy Museum, the New Britain Museum, and the Springfield Museum. Emily Mason died in December 2019 at the age of 87.