Part trickster, partial shaman, partial philosopher as well as total artist extraordinaire, 91-year-old Alden Mason continues turning out paintings that delight as well as intrigue.
Although he's completely a Northwesterner — born in Everett, educated during a UW, where he assimilated a expertise of a School of Art as well as taught there for more than 30 years — Mason is a male of a world. Intrigued by non-Western cultures, he has visited inland peoples in Africa, Central America as well as Asia, all of whom have influenced his work. So as well have children's art as well as folk art.
What results have been abstractions inside of that a viewer finds such tangible objects as animals both furious as well as tame, flowers, aged trucks, human forms — or during least parts of them — as well as a furious collection of unfeeling objects. They seem to burble up from a subliminal that recognizes a pathos of hold up yet indeed appreciates a great joke.
Of march his painting reflects his unusual hold up experiences, but he makes it really transparent that he copies nothing. "I assimilate," he says. "The assimilation shows itself in my paintings." So you might see evidence in his work of a massive headdresses of a Huli tribesmen from Papua New Guinea, or a suggestion bird that warned them not to exhibit as well many of their stories to this outsider.
You'll see a chickens as well as dogs from his childhood memory. And there have been countless images of a tulips his mom loved. She, by a way, lived to 104.
Earlier in his career, Mason combined large-scale paintings. You can see examples of these mammoth works during countless local venues including a lobby of a new Four Seasons Hotel, a King County Administration Building downtown, as well as in a collections of virtually every museum in a Northwest as well as in open as well as corporate collections nationwide. Beginning in Nov 2010, a Seattle Art Museum will present a yearlong exhibition explori! ng a man y facets of Mason's work.
Over a years he grown severe allergic reactions to a oils as well as turpentine so moved to acrylics as well as watercolors. The current exhibit facilities twenty-two paintings, mostly oil hang as well as watercolor washes upon paper with a little acrylics upon canvas. They constraint all a furious abandon, spontaneity as well as improvisational poise of this artist who embraces hold up as well as never fails to constraint the wonder.
Nancy Worssam: nworssam@earthlink.net
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