Charles Mason III

November 2023, Baltimore, MD.

Charles Mason was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. He has spent time away from the city, mostly for school, but has returned to live and work. He feels that the city has directly impacted the artwork that he makes. Living in Baltimore again has sparked an examination of his own life and family, relationships that he now explores through abstraction. Mason creates mostly large scale, mixed media works that contain sweeping and uninhibited mark making. Much of what he makes feels rooted in the body and raw emotion. In the past few years he has exhibited his work across the country, including participating in the traveling museum exhibition The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, which originated at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Last month I visited Charles at his studio to talk about his artwork and creative process.

Interview between Amy Boone-McCreesh and Charles Mason III

WHERE DID YOU GROW UP OR SPEND YOUR FORMATIVE YEARS, DO YOU FEEL THIS PLAYS A ROLE IN THE WORK YOU ARE MAKING NOW?

I grew up in Baltimore, I love Baltimore. I spent some time in other places for grad school and things like that. I would argue that being here, from Baltimore, has directly impacted my work. Maybe a month or so ago, I had a studio visit and we were talking about the color yellow, essentially ochre. I’ve used it in almost everything in here – I never really understood where it came from. So, I was showing her my work, we were on FaceTime and I’m showing her photos that I’ve been working from, with my dad included and in the photo it was a fall day. We were running at Druid Hill Park, and he was letting me win the run, and it was yellow all because it was Fall time. I was like, “Oh, wow” and then I started to think about this connection between childhood and this color. This act of playfulness, this act of joy that came from it. Because even now, I just find myself always drawn to this yellow ochre color. Sometimes you just need someone else to point it out to you. Then you realize you’ve been doing this thing because of X, Y, Z.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR WORK TO SOMEONE THAT MAY NOT BE FAMILIAR – WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO ACHIEVE WITH THE THINGS YOU MAKE?

For me, it’s like conditional love and enduring, mourning, grief, and hope. Those are usually the things I want people to feel. These thoughts around mourning, grief, love and care, and conditions in which we place love upon different people, places and things, and how those people, places or things endure that. Whether or not I add context to it, I just hope you feel something when you look at the work. That feeling isn’t up to me to dictate once it enters the world through an exhibition, a collection, or whatever. Like even a popup exhibition. It is no longer up to me to dictate how someone sees or portrays or experiences the work. They are going to have their own experiences with this color, with this object, with this motif or whatever.

THERE ARE RECURRING ELEMENTS IN YOUR WORK LIKE MATERIALITY, WORKING LARGE SCALE, WORKING ABSTRACTLY, AND THE FLOWER – CAN YOU TALK ABOUT WHAT ROLE THESE ELEMENTS PLAY IN YOUR PROCESS?

The material comes from not actually taking a lot of formal classes. I studied graphic design, that’s a very digital platform. Almost nothing by the time I was in undergrad was analog anymore- it was all digital. Even as I graduated, a lot of the things that we were using, and this is in 2014, became obsolete. It’s not to ever say that I really wanted to be a graphic designer, but that’s what I studied. It wasn’t until I went to grad school at Parsons, the new school, for three months that I realized fine art is where I wanted to be – where my hand was meant to be. While I was at parsons I started learning  about the likes of David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, these folks who literally took all different items and made these wonderful works out of them. So what I’m doing isn’t this foreign concept at all. There’s a long tradition of it, like Dadaism or Yves Klein doing body prints with literal bodies. So, it just became a natural thing for me to use a lot of material and a lot of different things because art becomes  expensive (over time). So early on I would  just ask people, “oh can I use your acrylic (paints)  that you’re not using?” Or I see some interesting books that are free, so I start cutting things out from them. Or something has lived in the studio and I kept stepping on it, I kept looking at it, and eventually I think, oh this would be interesting if I placed this alongside this (other) thing. That’s where the material comes from in my work. 

But the flower has different meanings. It’s metaphorical, is romantic, it’s poetic, friendship, family and all these things and representation of certain things for me. Even when I started doing the pots, I thought about Baltimore and I thought about how it’s a ( 62.3%) black city, which growing up in different parts of it, and different areas around it and the surrounding area, you would never know… I never thought that we were the predominant group of people here. Only until I got older where you start to see the pockets and see the different things and how people exist, coexist and things like that. At first, it started out just being a way to talk about my relationship with my dad. And it kind of grew into being about mourning and love and things like that too.

HOW DO YOU TYPICALLY STRUCTURE YOUR TIME AND ENERGY? WHAT IS YOUR ADVICE FOR OTHERS THINKING ABOUT HOW TO EXIST IN THE ARTS?

I don’t have a specific framework of 7:00 to 3:00 or 9:00 to 5:00. I, at times I wish I did, but I had to unlearn that part. I think the day-to-day life of an artist is trying to problem solve and critically think about the ways in which to sustain themselves while also maintaining an artistic practice. I think the best advice is to think about yourself as a creative and business. And to always show up as your best sincere and genuine self.  

IS THERE ANYWHERE PEOPLE CAN SEE YOUR WORK RIGHT NOW OR ANYTHING COMING UP THAT YOU’D LIKE TO PROMOTE?

Right now no, I’m looking forward to having some down time to rest and move a bit slower on a few objects that I am working on.