John Mason

John Mason (March 30, 1927 – January 20, 2019) was an American artist who did experimental work with ceramics. Mason's work focused on exploring the physical properties of clay and its "extreme plasticity". One of a group of artists who had studied under the pioneering ceramicist Peter Voulkos, he created wall reliefs and expressionistic sculptures, often on a monumental scale.

Biography Mason spent his early childhood in the Midwest; his family moved to Fallon, Nevada in 1937, where he finished elementary and high school. He settled in Los Angeles in 1949 at the age of 22. He attended Otis Art Institute, and in 1954 enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute, where he became a student and close friend of ceramicist Peter Voulkos. The two rented a studio space together in 1957, which they shared until Voulkos moved to Berkeley, California in the fall of 1958.

Mason taught sculpture at Pomona College.

Mason later equipped his studio to prepare, manipulate, and fire monumental sculptures in clay, many of which had to be fired in pieces weighing over a ton in kilns that had already been adapted to serve his large-scale purposes, before being assembled on the wall.

A subsequent series represents a more conceptual approach to Mason's interest in mathematics, one that is concerned less with the physical properties of clay as a medium and more with what those properties allow one to represent. As Richard Marshall wrote:

The Firebrick Sculptures, begun in the early 1970s, reveal a shift in Mason's work away from an involvement with materials and technique toward an involvement with the conceptualization and systematization of a piece that is removed from its actual realization. While maintaining an association with the ceramic tradition – firebricks are made of ceramic material and are used for the construction of kilns – their neutral color and standardized form make it possible to conceive of and execute large-scale geometric configurations of stacked bricks, such as Hudson River Series VIII (1978), in a variety of mathematically plotted arrangements.