Louise Mason

(b.1976, Johannesburg)

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Mason graduated with a honours degree in Fine Art at Stellenbosch University in 1998. While living in rural France for almost 2 years, she found the inspiration and the market for her first body of commercial work, mainly landscapes and abstract agricultural scenes. Through her husband’s involvement in the wine industry, she was commissioned to illustrate catalogues and design wine labels for a large wine merchant based in the UK.

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On returning to Cape Town in 2000 Louise continued to produce commissioned works for both private and corporate clients the most notable of which was the large body of work (550 originals) commissioned by the then Arabella Sheraton (Now Westin Grand) Hotel on the Foreshore.

Now a mother of three daughters, Louise is painting once again.

The subject matter of Mason's work, although wide and varied, is typically centred around the aesthetic use of colour, form and texture. Imbued with hints of nostalgia, the 2015/2016 series of Beach Paintings personifies for the artist 'surface areas of shapes and colour - instantly abstract compositions’. These wilfully crowded beachscapes punctuate with simple and repetitive patterns and rhythms; developing further into her recent Informal Settlement series. Here, from an elevated perspective, nuisances of the narratives are filled with jostling anonymity - where houses are reduced to geometric shapes, their close arrangement overlapping and colliding much like the people who live in them.

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These all serve to reinforce the artists desire to investigate the congested spaces we choose to inhabit. Do people find comfort in congregation? Does anonymity afford us privacy in close proximity? For Mason ‘an alternative view provides us with a different dimension on something we are used to seeing on a horizontal scale. Its context changes. All is not what it seems’.