Tyler Mason

Reflections

To paraphrase an artist friend of mine, watercolor painting is a good excuse to splash colors on paper.  The landscapes of the American West inspire with shapes, colors, dark and light, and the sheer vastness of the land; the challenge is to capture the intense brightness and colorations on paper.  Over the years I have been fortunate to have been able to visit a number of our national parks, monuments and other public lands and many of my subjects are based on these sources.  When I choose a subject, it is for the spirit and feelings of the subject, and how it will appear as a somewhat abstracted composition on paper.

After the choice of subject, the process of painting a watercolor drives the results: how the paint and paper dry, how the colors mix when wet but not when dry, how unpainted areas become highlights in the painting.  The results may vary from the original idea!  I still enjoy plein-aire painting, but I work now mostly from sketches, my photos, and my older paintings for current subjects.   If there is a theme to my work, I suppose it to be a celebration of our public lands and western landscapes.