World Travels Influence Artist Mason

WAITSBURG - Before Martha Mason moved to Thailand for two years in the early 1960s, she had her sights on music for her creative journey through life. But when she returned to the U.S., ready to pursue a college degree in the field, she couldn't do it.

"It was too emotional for me at the time," said Mason, who now lives in Dayton. "It just wasn't working."

And while in Thailand, she had discovered some- thing else that would lead her down a different path.

"I had an epiphany," she said. "On a whim, I discov- ered these exotic materials."

What she found was a kind of colorful and shiny gold and silver metallic paper that she cut up and forged into collages. It wasn't long before she real- ized she felt more deeply connected to these physical creations than to music and decided she wanted to be a fine artist instead.

Since those days of ex- perimentation in her early '20s, Mason's long and winding road as an artist of mixed media has led her to the Touchet Valley. And this month, some of her most recent still-life paintings have found their way into an ex- hibit of her work at Coppei Coffee on Waitsburg's Main Street. Her show of about a dozen pieces started last week and will run through February.

"When I saw her work, I just had to bring her here," said Allison Bond, the café's operator. "I begged her to do a show here."

Mason commutes from Dayton to Walla Walla, where she has taught what she calls "two-dimensional studio classes" at Walla Walla University since 1995.

She does some of her work at the college and some at home, which seems fitting given her subject matter: still-lifes from around the home, kitchen and garden.

At Coppei Coffee, Ma- son's brightly colored and loosely rendered tableaux greet customers at the café's entrance and take them around to the back seating area where they vibrate against the brick walls.

Perhaps the best-known artists her paintings bring to mind are French impressionists Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse, who both had a similar passion and flair for sunny table top displays of fruit and everyday house- hold objects.

Though firmly rooted in that same 19th-century tradition, Mason's images are even more fresh and spontaneous, almost leaning toward abstract expression- ism, a post-World War II art movement centered in New York.

That should come as no surprise since Mason attended the University of Illinois at Urbana when the selfstyled abstract expressionist Richard Diebenkorn taught there in the '60s and '70s. Although she didn't take any classes from Diebenkorn, the aura and influence of his style extended beyond the classroom to the rest of the campus, Mason said.

"Diebenkorn was of spe- cial interest to me," she recalled. "A major Kurt Schwitters show was piv- otal as I began to sense the expressive potential of col- lage."

One aspect of her style - the sun-saturated colors - carried over from her younger years growing up in Redlands, California, where she was born in 1944.

"That location has proved to be a significant influence for me," she said. "I was steeped in "California Color" and an imagined, related reality. I loved the Mexican influence all around me. Also, I was always the ide- alist who sought recluse in nature and classical music when everyone else was into Hollywood and Elvis. My folks were really farm people in a small town. We liked a country solitude."

Mason graduated with a Master's in Fine Arts from the University of Illinois and was hired out of school in the mid '70s to teach at the University of Wyoming at Laramie. There, she worked in tandem with sculptors Tom Hardy and David Reiff, and, as she put it "absorbed the intense beauty of the geographical setting."

In the late '70s, Mason moved back to California and settled in San Francisco, where she worked in photo galleries with Simon Low- insky, Stephen and Connie Wirtz, Jeffrey Fraenkel, Jim Sprouse and Frank Born.

"That's where I got into experimenting with collage and paint on a smaller scale, and doing black and white photography," she said. "I began to see how they (pho- tos) were really (like) paint- ings with their subject matter and intensity.

Since she relocated to the Walla Walla area nearly two decades ago, she has worked closely with Tom Emmer- son, WWU's art department chair whose "nature-art and calligraphy have proved to be a strong pull," Mason said. "I also appreciate the input of Neil Meitzler and many other artists in the valley."

During the past decade, a series of trips to Cuba reinforced her love for strong and vibrant colors, which are virtually everywhere in the island nation: stores, homes and even the fading patina of its famed and aging fleet of 1950s sedans.

"I'm home," she said about the way she feels be- ing in Cuba as an artist.

Mason works with acrylic paints, gauche, charcoal and pastels. Because these media dry quickly, she has to work rapidly and with high energy - a creative "window" that tends to generate the kinds of drips and splatters adding to the works' spontaneity, she said.

"A lot of "painting" is about the physical aspect," Mason said, noting her style "invites accidents."

She often paints in groups of three or more, putting her images "in conversation" with one another. And, in keeping with the inclination of abstract expressionists, she likes to build layers upon layers and work with brush- es so thick that working with them becomes the painterly equivalent of "using your elbows to put peanut butter on your bread."

But in terms of color, composition and emotion, she remains firmly loyal to Impressionism and the Japanese prints that inspired the likes of Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet.

"I'm totally stuck in the 19th century," she said.