Teaching After graduating from the UW with his MFA, Mason was offered a job teaching at the UW School of Art. Mason continued as a professor at the UW School of Art from 1949 until 1981.
Early career and influences, 1938 - 1976 Mason first began serious artistic pursuits when he arrived at the UW in 1938. He found that he had a natural aptitude for
watercolor painting. At this time Mason became acquainted with Alan Stone, an
art dealer in New York who represented his work through the late 1970s. The Greg Kucera gallery later described these works, saying ... :"With their audacious color, surprising scale, and exuberant abstraction, they represent a break with the drably colored or poetic narratives that had typified painting here following the advent of the
Northwest School… In the paintings titled the 'Burpee Garden' series Mason produced six by seven foot paintings in a color range not previously seen in the Northwest. Created from 1970 to 1976 this short period produced some of the most influential and groundbreaking works ever made in Seattle." Mason switched to less-toxic acrylics as the medium for his paintings. To develop his ideas, he spent time working on large paper pieces in search of his voice with this new medium. For works on paper from this period, Mason used a chopstick to drag acrylic paint across the surface and painted with thin, gestural washes on paper that was first painted black.
Late-career 1990s – 2013 In the 1990s, Mason branched out from
Big Heads and began to depict the full body, where his figures appear to dance. The sketchy black outline of each character gives the feeling that they are jiving to Mason's symphony of texture and color. Experimenting with acrylic paint application, Mason took the raised line of the
Squeeze Bottle pieces, his drawings,
Big Heads, and a chop stick; and combined them resulting in a less precise line. Mason sketched with the chopstick on canvas,
smudging the black or white line and adding splashes of vibrant color; he then filled in the backgrounds with a monochromatic palette on a scale averaging 60" x 50". Figure focused work occupied Mason during his later career. His studio was filled with "bird watching books, some tribal carvings from halfway around the globe, and a couple of framed carcasses of six inch long bugs." Mason died on February 6, 2013, in Seattle, Washington at the age of 93. He was remembered by the
Seattle Times as, "a vivid splash of color in the Northwest art world." == Travel ==