Alden Lee Mason,[1] né Carlson[2] (July 14, 1919 – February 6, 2013)[3][4] was an American painter from Washington known for creating abstract and figurative artwork.
While he was hitchhiking home from UW, artist Ray Hill gave him a ride back to the Skagit Valley and stopped at Deception Pass for an impromptu watercolor lesson.
Mason's time on a farm in the Skagit Valley was evident in his improvisational paintings in the form of animals and plants (such as sparrows and tulips), themes that reappeared in his artwork throughout his career.
Mason taught many professional artists from the Northwest, most notably Chuck Close, Roger Shimomura, Gene Gentry McMahon, and Tim Lord.
[7] The most attractive properties of watercolor for Mason were the same that made the medium difficult to master: fluidity of paint and permanence of each brush stroke.
In 1973 Mason went to New York City with his Burpee Garden Series at the invitation of his longtime friend and past student Chuck Close.
Mason began testing with oil sticks and washed his marks with turpentine to smudge them to produce a filmy watercolor effect.
[citation needed] While Mason devoted energy to producing drawings, he went to friend Robert Sperry's pottery studio and was given a squeeze bottle to decorate a pot for his mother.
At this time, his travels to Mexico and Central America influenced the iconography of his images with either patch worked blocks of design like a mola, or overall patterns like Mexican rugs.
His depictions of large human heads were filled with walking fish, bugs, flowers, and birds; reflecting his interest in entomology and world travels to New Guinea and Australia.
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".
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.
The free-formed garish figures and spirit birds of Mason's earlier works made their transition to contemporary pieces; depicted in a new medium.
The watercolor was visible through an application of thick oil stick and India ink that formed windows in the shape of big heads.
Roaming the earth to mostly indigenous cultures let Mason see elements of the world to record later in paintings as an extended, personal, travel journal.
A particular memory from this trip was of a spirit bird (which would forever be painted as a blackbird lingering in background) that called to the Hulis and told them to quit telling Mason tribal secrets.
When traveling, Mason took an interest in bird watching and indigenous cultures, with his personal experiences impacting his art in both style and content.
[23] Commissioned during the same time period for the Washington State House chambers, murals from artist Michael Spafford titled The Twelve Labors of Hercules were covered over within three months of being hung and threatened with removal, following calls for censorship from senators.
[23][25][26] While Mason's landscapes did not generate moral outrage, the interior decorator "insisted that the murals were inappropriate for the building because they clashed with the mauve-grey-color scheme.
The award ceremony was held on September 2, 2005, and other recipients included David Brewster, Pat Wright, Peter Donnelly and Sara Liberty Laylin.