Artist #1 - 2.01.10 - Mark Mason

At the current state of my work, the visual side is represented in abstract photographs. I feel they best portray the abstraction that is music. My music has no lyrics, so I feel my photographs should have no story to accompany them. I am interested mostly in natural abstractions. These scenes can be found anywhere and each one describes something about life, about the way things work and why they are the way they are. For example, this seemingly random, yet organically structured beauty can be found in the way paint chips and peels off of a wall, or in any given gum-spattered slab of sidewalk. No one created these abstractions, they simply came to be. So today I want to talk about Mark Mason, I came across him while researching abstract photography and was pleased to find that his images are very similar to mine. I have heard from people that these types of images are nothing but cathartic work that you do when you're bored. This always discouraged me because that's the work I like to do, I am not particularly interested in post-modernism. I suppose Mason is doing well enough as one of the top rankers in Google for abstract photographer, so he has inspired me to shoot what I want. Here is some of his work,

Mark Mason, Inverted Paint Splashes: Calgary, AB, 2007

Mark Mason, Swirled Sheet Metal: Near Baker, CA, 2008

Mark Mason,
Poster Scraps: Athens, Greece, 2008

Mark Mason, Smoke Damage: Calgary, AB, 2007

Visually I enjoy his work a great deal because I feel he has very similar sensibilities to me. Something that struck me as being true to my own work was how Mason describes his methods of making his work, "I create when I feel a connection. A subject's shapes, colours, and textures are only vessels, like words in a poem, to help explain what I feel. To this end, I work with my subjects spontaneously, as I find them, and do all of my creative manipulation with traditional optics, in the field." This feels like an accurate description of what guides me in the creation of my photographs. The shapes, colors, and textures are indeed like the words to a poem, or in my case, the melody of a song. I am taking it a step further by trying to understand these elements further by means of connecting them with music.