Stuart Mason

When he was six years old, one of his family members took him to a Civil War reenactment where they had a blacksmithing set up. This was the first time Stuart Mason worked with metal and immediately, the budding artist became enthralled with it. Being inspired by the outdoors already, he started building custom knives, sourcing exotic woods and using his dad’s power tools. During this time, Mason also started working with clay, wood, and the potter’s wheel, building rockets, and learning to make and then play his own guitar after watching Prince on stage during a Super Bowl halftime show.

While in high school, Mason built guitars and other sculptural projects in his dorm room until senior year when he petitioned his headmaster to let him teach his own course and be the only student in a guitar building class. He used the maintenance shed as a workshop to build a conceptual and economic electric guitar. This guitar was then submitted to the Scholastic Art and Writing Society for their yearly competition, won the regional Gold Key award, and was displayed in the Asheville Museum of Art. This was Stuart Mason’s first major accolade in the art world. His guitar continued to win prizes, including the American Visions Award at Carnegie Hall. Meryl Streep was the donor that year and the award came with a scholarship to any art institute program in the country. Mason would continue to learn, get into robotics, HTML, and coding, travel the world, have art shows, and trade his art for cars, food, and even a sailboat, all before a motorcycle accident fractured Mason’s neck, broke his hand, and caused a compound fracture in his right leg. He flatlined numerous times and had to relearn how to walk and create art.

Most of Mason’s early art was craft-based and sculptural. As he started to travel, the artist soon realized the longer he was away from his tools, the bigger the void in his heart would grow. To fill this creativity gap, he started painting more as the tools and materials needed to paint are more compact and transportable. He took major influence from Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Kandinsky, Michelangelo, and da Vinci. He picked up motifs from each of them, whether it be sourcing material from nature itself, trading art, integrating, technology, pushing absurdity, or abstraction.

Today, his sculptures begin with a draft of a design idea on paper, with inspiration pulled from the work of Brancusi and his simple but impactful form and diverse use of materials. Mason enjoys working with wood, steel, copper, marble, resin, enamel, and acrylics and bringing an intuitive approach to creating paintings with each stroke of paint guiding the next. Within the last few years. Mason has started to translate his methodical process of sculpture into painting, fully thinking out the concept when creating surrealist work by asking questions about society, current events, and other key questions. Mason’s use of new technologies has greatly improved his ability to work through a wider range of ideas at an expedited pace.

It’s impossible to label the art of Stuart Mason one particular style. He creates minimalistic abstracts, such as what Picasso would create to modern surrealism inspired by Salvador Dali, then back again to abstracts that focus on color theory and psychology, understanding how the eye moves to paired colors such as how Kandinsky would paint.

Accomplishments

Stuart Mason’s artwork has been displayed in almost every state and various cities around the world, including Rome, London, Berlin, and Amsterdam. He’s traded a painting for a memoir currently being written and has shown at Art Basel five times as well as at the New York and San Diego Art Expos.