Emily Mason

Emily Mason in her Vermont studio, 2018. Photo by Joshua Farr.

The grounds of Emily Mason’s house in Brattleboro enchant despite the mostly brown month of October. The few spots of color remaining mark the multiple flower beds that dot the fields and line the path leading to the front door. What looks like a large sculptural stone installation turns out to be the creative hiding of a septic system.

Mason is a petite woman in her 80s, who has a no-nonsense air. She wears her age well and sports pigtails behind her sparking blue eyes. Her bearing resembles a dancer’s. Her strong, clear voice is marked with a New York accent. Though diminutive, she comes across as a force to be reckoned with—dedicated and confident.

This abstract painter (and half of the art power couple with her husband, painter Wolf Kahn) has stuck to her vision for over 60 years, while raising two children and teaching at Hunter College for 30 years, in what until recently was a male-dominated field.

“Experiencing Mason’s paintings is like watching
an acrobat on a trapeze without a net. They have
both physicality and lyricism and are often
breathtakingly daring.”

Mason was born into painting. Her mother, Alice Trumbull, studied with Arshile Gorky and was known for her geometrical abstracts. Mason grew up in the bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village, spending many hours in her mother’s studio. She credits her mother, a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group, with being a primary influence, and “a great role model,” a strong woman who was able to raise her children while fully pursuing her painting career.

However, Mason eschewed her mother’s hard-edge abstracts. “I rebelled,” she says, and was determined to find her own “voice” as a painter. She went to New York City’s High School of Music and Art, attended Bennington College and then graduated after three years from Cooper Union. She finally found her voice during a two-year stay in Venice on a Fulbright scholarship. There, from 1956 to 1958, she painted at the Accademia delle Belle Arti and studied the colorful mosaics of Ravenna and Venice.

Emily Mason, Machu Picchu, 2010, oil on canvas, 68 x 52″. © 2018 Emily Mason/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

A large survey exhibit of Mason’s paintings, Emily Mason: To Another Place, at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) includes several works from the Venice period. Grouped together in a side room, they are exuberant abstracts in oil and pastel. The wine-red Bottom of the Barrel (1958) and golden Venezia (1958) hardly seem tentative early efforts with their slashing strokes and bold palette.

An important touchstone for Mason’s work has been her exploration of “analogous color,” introduced to her by Jack Larson, a textile designer who taught at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts where she studied during the summer of 1952. Mason describes this as the understanding that color can be modified by its proximity, its relationship to other colors in a painting. Color becomes freed from description, or value. Her desire, she says, is to create “conversations between colors.” Colors collide, confront, layer over, transmute one another. In works shown in To Another Place, paint is poured, dripped, splattered, wiped, slashed, splashed and brushed onto the surface.

Installation view of Emily Mason: To Another Place at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. Courtesy of BMAC.

In one of the largest paintings in the show, Machu Picchu (2010), flat planes of yellows are combined with swaths of red that seem to cascade over the surface. Whose Fingers Comb the Sky (1978) is a “conversation” between blues set off by orange and red. In some places, the orange has been wiped yet bleeds through and creates a shimmering effect with the blue and purple overlays. Experiencing Mason’s paintings is like watching an acrobat on a trapeze without a net. They have both physicality and lyricism and are often breathtakingly daring.

Mason first showed at the cooperative Area Gallery on the Lower East Side in 1960. After a trip to Africa with her growing family (by this time two daughters, Cicely and Melany, had been born) Mason showed at the Landmark Gallery in New York City. She won the Ranger Fund Purchase Prize from the National Academy. She continued to show in New York in the ’80s and ’90s at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery.

Mason calls her exhibition at BMAC a “miniretrospective.” The works from all periods of her career demonstrate a remarkably coherent and sustained vision. When asked about her work, she says, “There’s real continuity, not departure. A new tube of paint—that’s a departure for me, something to get excited about.”

During the decades she’s been working, many art movements have come and gone, from Abstract Expressionism to pop to hyperrealism. During her years coming up in the art world, most of the artists around her were students of Hans Hofmann. She was not interested. Perhaps this refusal to trumpet a particular theory or be a part of any movement, instead following her intuitive guideposts, is one reason Mason is not a “household name.” She has followed her own path, despite sharing her life with Wolf Kahn whose style aligns with expressionist realism.

Yet in the last two decades, the art world has taken notice, and Mason has exhibited extensively in New York and across the country. Concurrent with the survey of her work at the BMAC, Mason has a show of monoprints at Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts. And recently, two monographs have been published about her: Emily Mason: The Fifth Element and Emily Mason: The Light in Spring. BMAC has printed a hardcover catalog for To Another Place.

Mason’s studio is a skylit cabin on the farmstead she and Kahn own in Vermont. The light and brightness of gold-yellow canvases is a powerful first impression. Yellow, she says, is a color favored recently and adds, “I seem to go through periods of different primary colors.” As we look at several paintings, including the large blue/purple And Sings the Song and the gold/orange Before the Fall, Mason reflects, “You grab your accidents!”

Mason uses old cat food cans to mix the oil paint so it can be thinned sufficiently with turpentine and poured on the canvas laid flat on a table. As we wander through her studio she starts a new painting, pouring a thin puddle of turquoise, then manipulates it until it reaches a shape on the canvas that pleases her.

On this chilly day assistants have built a fire. Nevertheless, it is pretty cold in the studio. Mason wears a down vest, with bare feet. “I like to be barefoot in the studio,” she says. In a few days the Mason-Kahns will head to their other home, Manhattan. “I work better in Vermont. Nature, you know.”