Robert Mason by Sara Knelman

To the Lighthouse – Reflections on Robert Mason by Sara Knelman About a year after Robert Mason’s death in 2005, I inherited the job of curating a memorial retrospective of his work. The project had begun with Mason’s cooperation, and was both initiated and completed, recently and with characteristic grace, by Shirley Madill. Although I never met Mason, I found his spirit still very much alive, not only in the tangible legacy of his impressive body of work, but in the memories of many who knew him, and steeped into the constitution of the arts community in Hamilton. Over a few years, I spent a great deal of time looking at and researching his paintings, ceramics and photographs, re-enacting his installations in my imagination, and building a picture of his character both through the work, and from many conversations with his family, friends and colleagues.  One of the first in-the-flesh Mason works I saw was from the Erie Lighthouse series, and I have ever since been struck by the purpose and vividness of light in his works.  [© Robert Mason] The Lighthouse works themselves developed fluidly from an earlier series of abstract self-portraits, so that the image of the inverted lighthouse appears in some later works in the self-portrait series, and faint shapes from the self-portrait works seem to haunt many of the lighthouse paintings. These muted, melancholic images depict not the lighthouse itself, but the looming shadow of the lighthouse – an image generated by the illumination of the moon. These competing sources of light describe both a tension and a symbiosis between the artificial light of the tower and the natural glow from the night sky.     [photo credit: Bob McNair / Installation view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, 2010]   Mason often described the Lighthouse works in relation to the rival natural and human-made rays – the moon and the electric bulb – as “landscape balanced somewhere between the accident of nature and the rational imposition of man.”   [© Robert Mason]   While these works play with these sources of illumination – nature, electricity, oneself – Mason’s two later series of paintings, works from Romantic Geometry and Looking Up, seem to shift the focus, taking light as a means of revelation, or source of exploration, both physical and metaphysical.  This dichotomy was also a constant theme for the artist, explored and extended most eloquently in some of his large-scale installations, including The Floating Garden, emigration / MIGRATION / immigration and, with particular force, in the prototype for A Transformative Project for Negative Spaces, 2004, all of which evoke the interdependence of nature and human-made environments.     [  >>>>> FORWARD ]    [Distillate © HA&L + Sara Knelman  |  {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life. Robert Mason: Portfolio] [This article is sponsored by  HMECU, acknowledged with thanks by the Editor and Samizdat Press.]