Judith Mason has resisted the limelight but a retrospective of work will change all that, writes Mary Corrigall

Far from the Maddening Crowd

Judith Mason has resisted the limelight but a retrospective of work will change all that, writes Mary Corrigall

As if to block the world out while she muddles through her thoughts, Judith Mason sometimes closes her eyes when she is conversing. It can be slightly disconcerting for the listener but it is indicative of Mason’s retiring persona. Mason’s shyness extends to her professional life too; she is uncomfortable with offering up her art for public scrutiny. So despite her large talent, this is why she has maintained such a low profile over the last couple of decades. However, that is all set to change this month when a large retrospective of her work opens at the Standard Bank gallery in Johannesburg, where around 50 of her artworks dating from 1963 to 2008 will be on exhibit. Initially the gallery first enquired about exhibiting her earlier work, but Mason wasn’t open to the idea.

“An argument has been made that my work was better when I was a young woman then it is now. But I don’t share that argument I simply can’t afford to otherwise I would have a little cry and stop painting.”
After spending two years completing a large commissioned artwork for a private client based on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Mason, uncharacteristically, felt proud. And the introverted artist was gripped by the desire to exhibit again. Walking With and Away from Dante, is the piece’s title and it includes a 2 x 6 metre painting of Purgatory, which sees a confluence of hellish and religious iconography, references to socio-political realities of the contemporary milieu and, of course, Mason’s iconic monkey motifs. It is bound to be one of the showstoppers of the retrospective. It may also debunk the myth that Mason has past her prime.

Coinciding with the month of her 70th birthday, the retrospective, entitled A Prospect of Icons, will give art lovers and Mason herself an opportunity to reflect on how her vast oeuvre has developed over her forty year long career.
“I am inquisitive to see what graph my work makes.”
Ever the self-deprecating artist, Mason has often been convinced that her art hasn’t progressed in a linear way but rather diversified into different streams of expression or “unconsidered branches”, as she puts it.
“I was afraid that the retrospective would be an anthology of Mason’s ‘emotional tantrums.’”
However, after reading curator, Wilhelm Van Rensberg’s essay for the catalogue she realised that “they weren’t just making a thesis out of rubble” and that her oeuvre has in fact followed a coherent trajectory.

“I found it restorative to find that my work was more like an ill put together novel rather than a lot of short stories.”

When all the fanfare around the opening of the retrospective has died down, Mason looks forward to perusing the exhibition. She hasn’t kept records of her work
and hasn’t seen some of the artworks in a long time. But she is her harshest critic and she is slightly anxious whether all her artworks will meet the high standards she so obviously demands of herself. Mason says her long career has not been without regrets; her choice to remain independent with no formal affiliations to any gallery meant she “lived from hand

to mouth.” In tough times she was forced to sell paintings before they were finished.
“Sometimes I let works go before they were completely resolved. I am well aware I have damaged my reputation by doing that. As a freelance artist you sometimes fall back on panic rather than an income.”
Nevertheless, Mason says she has enjoyed a happy and productive career. A career she suggests that wasn’t founded on a proficient talent but rather driven by obsession and hunger.
As the title of the retrospective implies, the exhibition will be centred on the iconography that have dominated Mason’s art. Self portraiture is one of the leitmotifs that has characterised her aesthetic. Self-portraiture was attractive to Mason as she found that she didn’t have the ability to instantaneously capture the essence of sitters.
“It would be a long, laboured slog for me to get there and I never enjoyed it.”

As an introverted character, self-portraiture also suited Mason’s self-referential impulses.
“You can take risks with your own image. A couple of the images I have done are very ugly where I have gone to town on the bits of my body that I don’t like and bits of my attitude. With yourself as the ‘fall guy’ you can make the points quite sharply. There is a sort of energy that comes from a slightly contemptuous discourse with one’s own image and I do enjoy that.”
Mason’s art is characterised by the diverse iconography that she appropriates. Although as an art student she was disparaging of symbolists, she is fixated by symbolism. In the manner that writers devour the pages of dictionaries, Mason pores over encyclopaedias of symbols. Her interest in iconography is rooted her past, she observes.

“I was brought up in a very austerely atheist environment and low middle class family, which was very limited in terms of aesthetics and aesthetic things so I have always had a very strong visual hunger.”

Impressed with the “grace, beauty and luminosity” of Gothic, Romanesque and Renaissance art, Mason’s aesthetic has always aspired to high drama and drawn inspiration from religious iconography. While she admires and reveres religious faith she describes herself as an atheist. But her emotional or intellectual disconnection from religion means that she is able to reinvest and project new meanings into the religious symbols she employs. This can create conflict, especially when the symbols she appropriates are weighed down by predetermined connotations.
“If I do a figure on a cross, I am thinking of it as a non-religious crucifix. Christ was one of thousands of people who were crucified, it was a common degradation and it is the act of degradation that I want to explore. People don’t’ look long enough at symbolic work to deconstruct the meaning. One has this fight as a symbolic painter against the (received) text about symbols.”

Mason views painting as the act of creating “encoded worlds.” In this way the medium has served her well and with such a high capacity for engendering illusion, painting has also facilitated Mason’s predilection for creating fantastical or other worldly locales.
“I do inhabit alternate realities when I am working. I live in a picture when I am doing it. When I am living within that space it is completely real to me. It (painting) is a majestic way to make sense of your life.”
Ultimately, with each of her paintings Mason strives to conjure up a transcendental experience for viewers or engender that elusive energy that only art is cable of summoning.
“A work is successful when it radiates energy off the wall. It is like Pippa Skotnes said during one of her professorial speeches; ‘art is sacramental it is like taking bread and wine and creating the body of Christ.’ When you put things together (during the act of art making) you don’t’ make wallpaper, you make something that matters for a second, five seconds or half a lifetime.” Mason says the energetic or transcendental dimension of art defies description.

“But that is the excitement of being an artist; it is in trying to hunt that energy down and pin it to a wall.”

• Judith Mason’s retrospective exhibition at Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg will run until December 6