EMILY MASON : The Thunder Hurried Slow: Paintings, 1968-1979

"Formally, Mason is perhaps best known for her vibrant pigments and her intuitive grasp of color theory, as well as her unusual painting method that she mastered over the course of her career: using cat food tins, she mixed pigments and solvents to specific and varied consistencies, then poured them directly onto the canvas in a curious interplay with her painting’s other ‘pours.’ Crucial to the overall process was the time (or sometimes, the lack thereof) elapsed between these poured layers. Often, Mason would gesturally spread out the poured paint layer with a paintbrush (the one she had used to mix that tin), or apply other physical treatments such as scraping, sanding, finger painting, or contact with an unconventional tool such as an old t-shirt. Each of Mason’s paintings represents a calculated series of interactions between each mixed paint tin’s distinct alchemy; perhaps a given paint mixture would yield a crackling effect, a glossy sheen, or an ‘oil and water’ dispersion."

"On one hand, Emily Mason’s life in the 1970s recounts the archetypical struggle of women balancing societal expectations, a love for their families, and the monumental-on-its-own task of managing one’s career. On the other hand, it also reflects a unique struggle in her sense of duty to preserve the legacy and dignity of her artist-mother Alice Trumbull Mason, who died in 1971 at age 68 after an open battle with alcoholism that was brought on by the unfathomable trauma of the presumed suicide of her son, Emily’s brother Jo, in 1958. 'It is difficult to articulate, but I felt a desire to have my mother and her work and career acknowledged before I felt comfortable going out to pursue my own career,' said Mason in 2003.

 

Particularly difficult for Mason was the disparity in how she viewed her mother before Jo’s death, and how that dynamic shifted as her mother succumbed to the disease of alcoholism in the 12 years that followed. Alice Trumbull Mason had been a leading, avant-garde force within the 'boys club' of Abstraction in the 1930s-1960s New York art world, even co-founding the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 alongside canonical names such as Josef Albers. Her archives reveal extensive and meaningful correspondence with influential figures of the time such as Piet Mondrian and Gertrude Stein. As Ad Reinhardt remarked in the early 1960s: 'Were it not for Alice Trumbull Mason, we [the Abstract painters] would not be here, nor in such force.'"

"Mason welcomed chance as a creative principle. She recognized that painting was an art of dialogue with the material and not control of it…Mason herself noted, 'When I paint with oil, I am constantly learning.' With great modesty, she applied herself to separating her art from her ego. She cultivated the art of letting go. She intuitively knew she was at her best when she welcomed the flow."

- Dr. Barbara Stehle in "The Thunder Hurried Slow"

"In1965, just years before the earliest work in this exhibition was created, Emily Mason and her artist-husband Wolf Kahn (a German-born Holocaust survivor to whom she was married for 62 years at the time of her 2019 death) settled in Mason’s hometown of New York City after residing in Europe on and off since 1956. On the top floor of a Greenwich Village walk-up, they lived with two young daughters, one an infant, and Mason kept an art studio within the couple’s bedroom. In the early 1970s, Kahn began to experience significant recognition as an artist, and while this meant more financial stability, it compounded Mason’s household responsibilities and reduced her time in the studio.'The ’70s were difficult times as bringing up children, running a household, and continuing to paint all pulled me in different directions,' reflected Mason in 2003."