
James Mason. Photos courtesy of Friends of the Topiary Park
Anyone who’s been to the Topiary Park in downtown Columbus knows the titular topiaries are based on a work by French painter Georges Seurat.
Seurat, of course, is long dead. But the man who transformed his A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte into the verdant vision that has stood since 1992 is still working today.
And that one-of-a-kind landscape of a painting of a landscape is just one small part of the body of work created by acclaimed artist James Mason.
Mason has made his name as a sculptor with a variety of media, from topiaries to bronze figures to woodcarving. He’s also been teaching and working out of a studio at the Cultural Arts Center for nearly half a century. Now, at the age of 79, the world-renowned artist is reinventing himself.
“Right now as far as painting, I’m a figurative artist. I’ve just been doing that and developing a unique style. I went back to school and took a lot of life drawing classes to get back into it,” Mason says. “It was just picking up where I left off.”
Mason didn’t start out to be an artist. Born in Columbus in 1937 to a middle-class family, he describes his childhood as “pretty mundane” – except for his mother, that is.
“When I was a kid, 8 years old, she used to drag me down to the Columbus Museum of Art and make me look at George Bellows paintings,” he says. “My biggest influence was my mother. She was very old world.”
Even so, Mason was doubtful that he could turn his love for art into a career, enrolling in the engineering department at The Ohio State University.
“I majored in engineering because everyone said, ‘Don’t be an artist,’” he says.
But after taking a sculpture course as an elective, Mason realized art was his calling, and transferred to the Columbus College of Art and Design to major in fine arts. He got a job in advertising and also began frequenting the Cultural Arts Center.
“I went over there a lot because they had painting and drawing, but no sculptures. I talked to the director about getting a sculpture class, and that was my first job as an artist,” he says. “That was a dream job for an artist, because you just ran a studio there and the public came. People from all over the country would come and see how we had the institution set up.”
Mason worked in his studio in the Cultural Arts Center from 1967 to 2015. Now, in his barn studio in Lancaster, he can focus on his new role as a painter.
“I’m tired of lugging 200-pound rocks around,” he says. “The nice thing about watercolors is you can carry your entire portfolio under your arm. There’s also the excitement of a new art form. That’s what keeps you young. If I didn’t do that, I’d be sitting in a rocking chair.”
Though Mason has been working in a different medium, he remains true to his philosophy.
“I love to do the figure. In my own aesthetic, my own philosophy, I like to do artwork that reflects life in general, the life we live,” he says. “It’s an old shoe, but it’s still true. It’s still basically why we do art. I’ve done pure abstraction before, but for me, it didn’t quite fulfill what I really wanted to express.”
Mason is ambivalent about explicitly defining the purpose of his art – or any art, for that matter.
“Ultimately, I think the human race gravitates toward pure beauty. I think human beings are hard-wired for it,” he says. “I can’t prove it, but these cavemen did these beautiful paintings way down deep in the caves. Why did they do that? Nobody really knows; they just did it. It’s all kind of a mystery, and as far as I’m concerned, it should stay a mystery. You don’t need to understand.”
Though the Topiary Park – for which he created the structural frames in 1988, four years before his vision would come to fruition – is Mason’s most recognizable work, it’s not the only place it can be found. He is also represented by Hammond Harkins Galleries in the Short North and has several pieces on display there.
While his latest sculptures have been sold, Mason isn’t slowing down any time soon.
“I want to drop dead at the easel,” he says. “That’s the way to go if you’re an artist.”
Jaya Pillai is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
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