Napton Roadside, 20" x 16", Oil On Canvas
Life is messy. Maybe that’s why we’re attracted to the “picturesque”; the order and stillness of Edward Hopper’s “Sunday Morning”, the gauzy atmospherics and simple contrast of two figures, one old, one young in George Caleb Bingham’s “Fur Traders on the Missouri River” - two undoubtedly picturesque paintings. While these simple, direct, light-filled canvases are no doubt attractive to the eye, it’s the complexity under the surface, the melancholy implication of the passage of time and our own mortality that stirs deeper currents and causes those images to stay fixed in our brains. And it is the contrast between the two, the surface calm with the depths of darker thought that make these great works of art. The 16th century Dutch painter Bruegel was genius at depicting the complicated and messy truth of his life and times. The regional painters of the 20’s and 30’s and 40’s, Thomas Hart Benton, George Bellows, Maynard Dixon, Rockwell Kent, and the painters known as The Canadian Seven are inspiring in this way. Their paintings are about familiar territory and larger, darker truths.
The intimacy of known ground is a rich and complicated source of inspiration. I paint places I know and love with a non-ironic, mostly straightforward, sometimes romantic vision. It can be the back yard or places in my personal history that are full of wonder and awe. Of particular interest to me are baseball players, fields and stadia, a passion that dates back to the summers I spent in St. Louis at my grandparent’s house, a place filled with love and my adolescent fantasies of being a ballplayer. To this day I long for the pure joy and wonderment I felt imagining the light filled space of the ballpark. The only way I have found to capture and communicate this feeling is by organizing and unifying the visual elements with a specific light, and a strong composition.These elements are timeless artistic virtues and organizing principles that I try to base my work on.
Afternoon On The Missouri, 26" x 32", Oil On Canvas
"In a recently discovered letter, my father relates how much baseball has meant to him, his father, and grandfather through the years. That's four generations, back to the 19th century, that loved, and continue to love the game."
- Max Mason
Twilight, Saline County, 22" x 24", Oil On Canvas
Born in 1952, Max Mason grew up in the Boston area, attended Belmont Hill School and then Vassar College where he graduated in 1975 with a degree in Geology. He began studying art his senior year in college and after some adventures moved to Philadelphia with his future wife in 1981 to study with the landscape painter Neil Welliver at The University of Pennsylvania. He had his first one person show of large landscape paintings at the Gross McCleaf Gallery in 1986.
Soon after he began painting baseball subjects and had a one person show at the Butler Institute of American Art in 1992. In 2004 he was commissioned by the Philadelphia Phillies to do a number of paintings and murals for their new ballpark. He has exhibited internationally and has had over 20 one person shows nationwide.
Mason is represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia and will have and will have his second one person show at The Butler Institute in the spring of 2021. He is also a musician and performs with his daughter Margaret as well as with the power swing band “The After Dinner Mints”. He released his first album, “Social Security” in 2020. He and his wife live in Wynnewood, PA.
Elizabeth Johnson: How do you like Major League Baseball’s new rules: the pitch timer, shift restrictions, and bigger bases?
Max Mason: As an unrepentant traditionalist, I was initially horrified. But after watching a spring training game on TV, I changed my mind on two things: the pitch clock will speed up the pace of play, which is good, and I accepted the size of the bases almost immediately. If the players aren’t complaining and it makes the game safer––what the heck. The shift restrictions, however, are terrible. They reward a limited approach to the art and science of batting...
“I am drawn to subjects that I don’t fully understand visually, that are mysterious, elusive, and at times almost impossible to see clearly.”
-Christine Lafuente
In Subtones in Springtime, Christine Lafuente explores the parallels between color and musical form in her newest series of paintings. The overlapping terminology between art and music helps to illuminate comparisons between the two fields. Lafuente says, “I begin to transpose visual experience into an imaginary painting experience… like a musician who reads music with the playing of a specific instrument in mind, this kind of looking is experienced in the language of oil color, brushwork, and flatness.” Likewise, Lafuente focuses on the relevance of subtones, which she likens to subconscious presence, or emotional states that can be captured and embedded within her works.
Max Mason considers himself a landscape painter — it’s just that many of those landscapes feature immaculately cut grass and bases arranged in a diamond shape 90 feet apart.
The Philadelphia-area artist will display some of his baseball-themed work in the exhibition “Making the Game,” which opens Sunday at the Butler Institute of American Art.
Youngstown, OH, May 18, 2021 – The Butler Institute of American Art at 524 Wick Avenue in Youngstown, Ohio is delighted to announce the opening of an exhibition of baseball paintings just in time for summer. Max Mason: Painting the Game will open Sunday, June 13, 2021 at 12:00pm in the museum’s Giffuni Gallery on the second floor, where the artist will present a gallery talk at 2:00pm. The exhibition will be on view through September 5, 2021. Admission to The Butler and Max Mason’s gallery talk are free.
The paintings of Max Mason are impressive on a variety of levels. He is a masterful draughtsman who can lay down paint in the manner of the old masters. Staying with the magical theme of baseball he presents a virtual clinic on composition and color usage. In a museum filled with exquisite paintings, the works of Max Mason more than hold their own. The Butler is delighted to present this outstanding exhibition of the work of Max Mason.
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions of new paintings by gallery artists, Natasha Das and Max Mason and a collection of mini exhibitions, featuring the work of Giovanni Casadei, Rhea Cutillo, Ying Li, Scott Noel, Thomas Paquette, Jeffrey Reed and Val Rossman.
Textures created with thread are to Natasha Das what brushstrokes are for other artists: fundamental, visceral, expressive elements. Das’ labor-intensive compositions convey her unique voice by representing an engagement with both abstraction and the weaving tradition of her native India, lending an autobiographical component to her work. . .
