[2] One of a group of artists who had studied under the pioneering ceramicist Peter Voulkos, he created wall reliefs and expressionistic sculptures, often on a monumental scale.
[1][3] Mason spent his early childhood in the Midwest; his family moved to Fallon, Nevada in 1937, where he finished elementary and high school.
Writer Richard Marshall commented that in their "rawness, spontaneity and expressiveness, [the pieces] give the impression of having been formed by natural forces.
[2] According to writer and curator Barbara Haskell, who wrote the introduction to the catalog for Mason's 1974 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art, "These pieces have a monumentality and physical size that had no precedent in contemporary ceramics".
While maintaining an association with the ceramic tradition – firebricks are made of ceramic material and are used for the construction of kilns – their neutral color and standardized form make it possible to conceive of and execute large-scale geometric configurations of stacked bricks, such as Hudson River Series VIII (1978), in a variety of mathematically plotted arrangements.