John Mason

Lives in Los Angeles, California (2008)John Mason spent his childhood in Nevada, where his family had relocated. Although he moved to Los Angeles at the age of twenty-two to study ceramics, the vastness, timelessness, and particular coloration of the Nevada desert was to exert a pervasive power on all of Mason's art.1 Mason attended the Otis Art Institute from 1949 until 1952 and the Chouinard Art Institute in 1953-1954, returning to Otis in 1955-1956. Peter Voulkos had been hired at Otis during Mason's absence, and Mason studied with Voulkos in his final semester in school. This last formal educational experience was to prove pivotal. Voulkos, never a conventional instructor, made his classroom a studio, where he worked along with the students and where learning took place by doing and through dialogue. The group that formed first at Otis (and which eventually included not only Mason, Paul Soldner, and Voulkos, but Robert Arneson, Kenneth Price, Billy Al Bengston, Mac McCloud, and others) was to recast American ceramics during the next decade, transforming it from a conservative craft to a fine art that pushed clay to and beyond its previous boundaries and created a new kind of monumental sculpture. Although Mason's work developed simultaneously with that of his colleagues during these ten years, it always remained unique. Between 1955 and 1957, the artist supported himself as a designer for ceramic dinnerware at the Vernon Kilns in Los Angeles. At the same time, he made a series of pot and plaque shapes with asymmetrical forms and kinetic skins, sometimes decorated with the crosses and spheres that would recur later, which moved his sensibility in the opposite direction, toward non-utilitarian sculpture. Vertical Sculpture of 1963 belongs to this proud period in Mason's career and in Los Angeles art. It should also be seen in the context of the innovative series Mason began in 1957 with Vertical Sculpture??Spear, his first large?scale piece. Made of glazed stoneware, the 1963 sculpture is otherwise a completely nontraditional work of ceramic art. It is not, for one thing, a vessel. Instead, Mason has built slabs around a central armature, resulting in a column that forms a solid, irregular tower. Although not as large as others works in the series, some of which stand 10 feet high, Vertical Sculpture, at almost 5 feet high, rises to the lower end of human scale and departs radically from the tabletop scale of most pottery. For the Vertical series, Mason worked the clay, shaping the plastic medium when wet. In the plaques, Mason had first let "happy accidents" happen when he deliberately dropped his slab of clay onto a variety of objects. The indentations, folds, stretch marks, and tears became his sculpture's surface forms. Like Abstract Expressionist painters of his era, Mason courted spontaneity and accepted gesture in his free?form and geometric three?dimensional monoliths, even when surface activity resulted from technical limitations or missteps in the kiln. Mason's ground?breaking work was first shown in one?artist exhibitions at Los Angeles's legendary Ferus Gallery in 1959. In 1966, Mason presented an impressive body of work in a large exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This survey revealed that he differed from others in his group; eventually, he discovered a greater affinity with the Russian Constructivists than with the Abstract Expressionists. But even in his first decade of work, his move toward geometric simplification and conceptual logic was evident.Firebrick, made of ceramic materials and used to build kilns, became Mason's sculptural medium throughout the 1970s. In the 1978 Hudson River Series, ten environmental works created for six spaces during three months, these firebricks were stacked and sequenced in mathematically plotted arrangements. It will be no surprise to learn that Mason has returned as an innovator and mature artist to the vessel, smaller scale, and glazes. He remains a contortionist of materials, tradition, and even time._____________________1. See Haskell John Mason Ceramic Sculpture, n.p. ReferencesHaskell, Barbara. John Mason Ceramic Sculpture (exhibition catalogue). Pasadena, California: Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, 1974. Kelley, Jeff. "In Search of a Transparent Art: John Mason." American Ceramics, 2 (Winter 1983), pp. 26-33.Marks, Ben. "John Mason's Conceptual Journey." American Craft, 50 (December 1990-January 1991), pp. 36?41.McCloud, Mac. "John Mason." Ceramic Monthly, 36 (January 1988), pp. 46-48.