There is an old argument, quiet and unresolved, running beneath every painting Lib Mason makes: that beauty and discomfort are not opposites, but companions, and that one can be made to carry the other for as long as a viewer is willing to keep looking.
An Inheritance, Repurposed
Mason’s technical vocabulary comes from elsewhere, from Flemish panels and Renaissance workshops, from a tradition built on grisaille and glaze, where a painting begins in monochrome and only slowly, through repeated transparent layers, arrives at color and light. She did not inherit this method by accident. It was chosen, deliberately, roughly eight years ago, when she stepped away from a long commercial career that had begun at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied editorial illustration, and carried her through years of work for major publications including Rolling Stone and Time Life Warner, and later into product development and artist-branded licensed lines. That earlier career rewarded speed, legibility, and the swift communication of a client’s message. What she turned to afterward rewards none of those things. It asks, instead, for time, the kind of time a grisaille demands before it will yield to color, the kind of time a glaze needs to dry before the next one can be laid on top.
The Present, Wearing an Old Coat
What Mason does with that inherited patience is where her work becomes genuinely interesting. She does not use the Flemish technique to paint saints or allegories drawn from mythology, the traditional subjects of the tradition she borrows from. She uses it to paint the present, political violence, border politics, environmental collapse- subjects that arrive, in most other contexts, stripped of ornament, delivered as fast and as plainly as a news alert. Mason refuses that plainness. Her artist statement describes an interest in beauty, symbolism, humor, and absurdity as ways of approaching material that might otherwise be too difficult to look at directly, and the paintings bear this out: they invite the eye before they reveal themselves to the mind, and the gap between those two moments is where the work actually happens.
Menace, Dressed in Flowers
RIP ICE occupies that gap most uncomfortably. Painted in response to the shooting of Renee Good, the composition offers two grinning, blindfolded devils pulling a hood over a seated woman, the entire scene wrapped in brilliant color and flowers, so that violence and ornament share the same surface without either one yielding to the other. Mason has rendered the woman’s skin chalky, pale, and uneven, denying her any specific racial or personal identity, so that she becomes not one woman but a vessel for anyone who might sit in her place. The devils’ blindfolds are the painting’s most exacting detail, figures who act while unable to see, an image of power that harms without discernment, unchecked and inadequately trained, reaching for whoever happens to be nearest. The painting does not raise its voice to say this. It lets the flowers say it instead, and the quiet is more unsettling than any shout would be.
A Wall Made of Something Softer
Where RIP ICE traffics in menace, Esparza, Nadine and the Beautiful Wall traffics in absurdity, and does so with a lighter hand. Responding to the wall built between Mexico and the United States, a structure Mason found troubling not only for what it does to people but for how it disrupts the unthinking migrations of animals across a landscape that was never drawn with borders in mind, she declines to paint the wall as it exists. She paints, instead, what innocence might build in its place: two young girls constructing a wall of cakes, tier upon tier, meant to keep out trolls rather than people. Pinocchio watches from the edge of the scene, small and largely unremarked upon, a wooden reminder that truth has become difficult to locate in a world thick with noise. The substitution of cake for concrete does not diminish the painting’s political charge; it relocates that charge into the register of fable, where absurdity is permitted to say what direct statement cannot.
A Child at the Edge of What’s Left
Flight asks for none of the symbolic density of the other two works. A young girl stands alone in a barren landscape, and the painting’s entire argument rests on that isolation. She is witness and symbol at once, watchful, vulnerable, standing at the edge of a future that is still, barely, being decided. The painting does not specify what has gone wrong. It only insists that something has, and that a child has been left to face it.
What the Surface Asks of Us
Across these three paintings, and across the practice they belong to, Mason’s project comes into focus: a conviction that an old, unhurried way of making images can still hold the present moment, and hold it more honestly for the delay it imposes. The glazed surface does not soften what lies beneath it. It simply insists that we arrive there slowly, the way light arrives in a Flemish panel, gathering, layer by layer, until what was once obscured becomes, gradually and then all at once, impossible not to see.
Explore Lib Mason’s full collection of oil paintings and exhibition updates at libmasonartist.com. To follow along with her studio practice and new glazed works, connect with her on Instagram @libmason5687.