EmilyMason SUMMER’S RESPONSE
EmilyMason SUMMER’S RESPONSE APRIL 27 - JUNE 3. 2012
LLC
Railyard: 1613 Paseo De Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 Downtown: 125 West Palace Avenue | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.8997 www.lewallencontemporary.com | info@lewallengalleries.com cover: Sorbet, 2011, oil on canvas, 60.5” x 52”
Emily Mason: Summer’s Response
One of the fascinations of exquisite abstract painting is its capacity to exist at the edge of mystery: that liminal space between what is known and what is wondered. The elegant orchestrations of harmonious color and form that comprise Emily Mason’s non-representational paintings engage this area of the in-between amid our everyday worlds and our imaginations.
transparent layered washes scumbled together, intensifies the sense of the unexpected. Revealed is the power of the indistinct, that ineffable quality of the uncertain to yield joy, grace and inspiration. Laying eyes on their vibrant colors, mediated hues, and compositional harmonies, one has the feeling of coming close to the edge of the unknown, of entering an enticing realm that sharpens the senses and enriches life.
Like a great poem, these paintings possess a transformational power to extend the boundaries of the self into unknown territory. The experience of them can help modulate the noise of ordinary living and sort out the detritus strewn in our minds by life too arduously lived. Maybe the novelist Saul Bellow was looking at a Mason when he wrote that “Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos … an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”
Enigmatic arrangements of forms and the lustrous auras that emerge from unseen substrata compound this delight in recondite possibility. Mason’s balletic brushwork and deft syncopation between shiny surface and diaphanous saturation combine to make visual music that is scored solely in notes of mystery and motion. These works can be startling or they can be spellbinding. They can tantalize between a feeling of the almost familiar and one of utter incredibility. They can be extravagant while also being intimate. In their variation these works excite even as they subdue.
The engaging beauty of Mason’s work has remarkable power to arrest attention even as it evokes equanimity. The striking areas of lush color in a Mason painting gently embrace one another and wash against the hardened edge of the modern viewer’s way of seeing, like waves smoothing jagged boulders on the shoreline of life. Mason’s alternating use of opaque fields of pigment, juxtaposed with
The engrossingly meditative effect of Mason’s canvases is perhaps a consequence of her unique and adept blending of a Color Field artist’s sensitivity to paint application combined with a depth of emotional 2
torn down. Unlike in a city where a new structure goes up as soon as an old one comes down, in this part of Vermont the cellar holes endure. They are voids that are full of meaning, constant if subtle reminders of what has come before – and nearly sacred as imprints connecting the bustle of modern life with the constancy of the past. Like the cellar holes not far from her studio, Mason’s paintings have substance in their ethereal presence. In the mystery of their indeterminacy there is a reassuring clarity and a connection to the eternal.
feeling equally profound – if more modulated and less angst-ridden – to that of any Abstract Expressionist’s. In her work there are reflected two attributes that appear initially as odd paradoxes but, when juxtaposed on her canvasses, seem brilliant. Evident is the elegant control of an executant hand skillfully crafting unalloyed forms in vibrant hues of varying densities. Simultaneously it is apparent that this hand is also one that channels interior feeling with an intuitive spontaneity reminiscent of the most accomplished jazz musician. In the words of Rilke, her Orphean work “dances the orange.”
Though she comes squarely out of the New York Abstract Expressionist tradition of the mid-20th century, Mason has cultivated incomparable refinement in the making of the non-representational picture. Now in her 80th year, the graceful fluidity of her work surpasses the unrestrained gesticulations of her action painter forebears and produces a uniquely beguiling art form, one founded on the energetic gentility of her own style of lyrical abstraction. In probing for the sublime within realms of interior feeling, Mason perfects a considered engagement with the unknown in place of the mere raw ego her forebears dispensed onto canvas.
She has described her own process as a combination of serendipity and conscientious practice, of collaborating with chance while staying alert to the beauty of unintended consequence. The expressive yet restrained aspect of her paintings results from a synergistic interplay of diverse techniques including pouring, staining, scumbling, blotting and brushwork that is dexterous and graceful. Writing for the book on Mason’s work, Emily Mason: The Fifth Element, David Ebony, an editor of Art in America, likened the effect of these techniques to the Aristotelian “fifth element”, ether, the rarefied quintessence that has been called “more subtle than light.” So apt was the analogy it gave the book its title. Ebony observed: “The geometric forms seem to emerge from or dissolve into an ethereal mist … consistently enigmatic, amorphous spaces that appear to be softly lit from within.”
With its use of remarkable veils of unfurled color and graceful gesture, Mason’s brand of abstraction consecrates profound personal expression while endowing it with the added capacity for joyful quiescence in the visual experience of it. Refined technique confronting emotional energy in Mason’s art produces visual explorations that are adventuresome stimulations of mind and heart, and contain enduring sources for contemplative regeneration – with Mason’s singular facility for color and light as their activating force.
Contrasting with this feeling of the ethereal, there is an uncanny substantiality to Mason’s abstraction. Though clearly empyrean and full of light, these paintings also seem to have a definite corporeal presence, a grounded solidness that somehow provides a reassuring connection to the immutable. Most of the work included in “Summer’s Response” was conceived or completed by Mason in her studio in rural Vermont where indentations called “cellar holes” dot the woods. These are the ghost-like impressions in the ground that remain visible long after the houses that stood above them have burned or been
–Kenneth R. Marvel
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Tidings, 2008, oil on canvas, 62” x 52”
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Post Season High, 2010, oil on canvas, 54” x 50”
Hot Ticket, 2011, oil on canvas, 20.5” x 24”
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Red Tape, Blue Tape, 2011, oil on canvas, 50” x 52”
Deep Within, 2011, oil on canvas, 54” x 36”
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Hidden Lake, 2009, oil on canvas, 32” x 24”
Marrakech, 2009, oil on canvas, 22” x 28”
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Salsa, 2011, oil on canvas, 24” x 24”
Natural Ingredients, 2008, oil on canvas, 49.5” x 60”
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Aired Out, 2011, oil on canvas, 60” x 50”
A Clear Day, 2008, oil on canvas, 22” x 16”
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Barest Change, 2000, oil on canvas, 52” x 40”
Window on the World, 1998, oil on canvas, 44” x 44”
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Surpassing Ermine, 1985-86, oil on canvas, 60” x 52”
Sea Lane, 2011, oil on canvas, 54” x 50.25”
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March is Heard, 1998, oil on canvas, 60.25” x 54.25”
Outpost, 2002, oil on canvas, 50” x 26”
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Moon Rise, 2011, oil on canvas, 40” x 18”
Change in Temperature, 2011, oil on canvas, 28” x 22”
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Bosporus, 2007, oil on canvas, 54” x 72”
Tipping Point, 2011, oil on canvas, 40” x 40”
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Intercepted, 2011, oil on canvas, 48” x 32”
Orbit, 2009, oil on canvas, 24” x 18”
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Scrim, 1981, oil on canvas, 28” x 28”
Off Limits, 2009, oil on canvas, 54” x 26”
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From the Sea, 2010, oil on canvas, 22” x 16”
Soundless, 2011, oil on canvas, 50” x 32”
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Reviewed, 2011, oil on canvas, 40” x 50”
Advantage, 2011, oil on canvas, 44” x 36”
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Sunset Lake, 2011, oil on canvas, 52” x 64.5”
The Heat is On, 2011, oil on canvas, 32” x 18”
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Blue Print, 2009, oil on canvas, 54” x 26”
The Wind is Up, 2004, oil on canvas, 44” x 28”
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Life Line, 2005, oil on canvas, 24” x 18”
Emily Mason Born: 1932, New York, NY
Education: Bennington College, VT, 1950-52 | The Cooper Union, NY, 1952-55 (BFA, 1975)
AWARDS AND GRANTS 1952 Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Liberty, ME 1955 Yale-Norfolk Summer Art School, Norfolk, CT 1956-58 Fullbright Grant for Painting, Venice, Italy 1979 National Academy, Ranger Fund Purchase Prize, Springfield Museum, Springfield, MA 1984 Art in Embassies, Art Bank Pilot Project
2005
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2012 LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM (also 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010) 2009 David Findlay Jr. Fine Art, New York, NY (also 2003, 2005, 2007) 2008 Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX 2005 Ogunquit Museum, Ogunquit, ME 2005 Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, VT (also 1995) 2004 Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice, Italy 2003 Flynn Gallery, Greenwich, CT 2001 M B Modern, New York, NY (also 1997, 1999) 2001 Sothern Vermont Artists, Manchester, VT (also 1983, 1984, 1988) 2001 Colby-Sawyer College, New London, NH 2000 Spheris Gallery, Walpole, NH 1996 Thomas Babeor Gallery, San Diego, CA (also 1995) 1995 Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI (also 1991) 1994 Walker-Kornbluth Gallery, Fairlawn, NJ 1993 Marlboro College, Marlboro, VT (also 1976) 1992 Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, NY (also 1984, 1987, 1990) 1991 Aba Gallery, Lebanon, NJ 1991 Associated American Artists, New York, NY 1989 Kornbluth Gallery, Fairlawn, NJ 1983 Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR 1982 Hamilton Gallery, Charleston, SC 1981 Landmark Gallery, New York, NY (also 1977, 1978) 1980 Educational Testing Service Conference Center, Princeton, NJ 1972 Gallery North, Setauket, NY 1968 Windham College, Putney, VT 1962 Area Gallery, New York, NY (also 1960, 1961)
2000
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2007 Los Angeles Art Show (exhibited by LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM) at Barker Hangar, Santa Monica, CA
2005 2002 2001
2000 2000 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 1996 1994 1993 1992 1989 1989
1984 1983 1982
1979 1975 1975
“Three Generations of Abstract Painting: Alice Trumbull Mason, Emily Mason, Cecily Kahn,” Hunter College, New York, NY U.S. Embassy Residence in Vatican City, The Holy See “Kahn Mason Inaugural Exhibition,” Weil Art Gallery, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL “All American: Contemporary, Modern and Master Painting,” David Findlay Jr. Fine Art, New York, NY “The Likeness of Being: Contemporary Self Portraits by 60 Women Artists,” D C Moore, New York, NY “Separate and Togerther: Wolf Kahn-Emily Mason,” Union College, Schenectady, NY Robert Hull Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, CT “A Friendship in Art: March Avery-Emily Mason,” Walker-Kornbluth Gallery, Fairlawn, NJ “Spirit of Nature II,” M B Modern, New York, NY “All in a Family,” New Britain Museum, New Britain, CT “Shared Passion,” M B Modern, New York, NY “Important Papers,” Kornbluth Gallery, Fairlawn, NJ “Art of the Monoprint,” Kornbluth Gallery, Fairlawn, NJ (also 1991, 1993) “Essences,” Kornbluth Gallery, Fairlawn, NJ “Among Family,” Associated American Artists, New York, NY “The Painter and the Printmaker,” Associated American Artists, New York, NY “American Women Artists–The Twentieth Century,” Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; Queensborough Community College, Bayside, NY “1 + 1 = 2,” Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York, NY “A Family in Art,” Kornbluth Gallery, Fairlawn, NJ “Alice Trumbell Mason/Emily Mason, Two Generations of Abstract Art,” Newcomb College, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; Washburn Gallery, New York, NY; Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY “118 Group Show,” Landmark Gallery, New York, NY (also 1972, 1973, 1975) “Two Artists,” Brattleboro Art Center, Brattleboro, VT “Color Four Artists,” Landmark Gallery, New York, NY
LLC
Railyard: 1613 Paseo De Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 Downtown: 125 West Palace Avenue | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.8997 www.lewallencontemporary.com | info@lewallengalleries.com above: Where the Water Flows, 2011, oil on canvas, 22� x 42�