“My paintings are a private world of improvisation, spontaneity, humor and pathos, exaggeration and abandon. The images and shapes are often figurative, organic personal totem poles, which in closer view become highly abstract. They reflect my travels and interest in tribal art and children’s art. Old-fashioned emotional involvement is still my main priority in painting.” – Alden Mason (1919-2013)
Alden Mason is proof that an artist’s style is never static. Born in 1919 in Everett Washington and raised on a farm in the Skagit Valley. At a very young age he began to appreciate the natural environment that surrounded him and these influences carried throughout his artistic career guiding and developing his unique and varied vision from abstraction to figurative and back again.
And as a Professor of Art at the University of Washington, he inspired and encouraged many students, some of whom become strong visual artists on their own, such as Roger Shimomura, Gene Gentry McMahon, and Chuck Close.
