2015. Softcover, 93 pages. Very good condition; as new.
Review: "Anyone who has followed this straight talking mystic over fifty years of poetics, romance, religion, Africa and her place in it, who has learned from her what it is like to stand aghast and amused at the demented business of making paintings, despite all kinds of logic and reason - will recognize in this pearl of a book much of the commentary that has accompanied her artwork over the years." - Greg Kerr "From the rich soil of a fabulously informed and intrepid imagination, Mason has grown a history of dark metaphors for our singular place in the evolution of Africa. Her book, despite her disclaimer, "this is not a how-to book. It is a how-to-think-about-how-to book," is the perfect concordance to that history." - Greg Kerr "In this publication - a wonderful companion to art-making - Mason allows herself the freedom to write as she speaks, from the hip, from the heart and (you'd better believe it) from the head. She addresses all the departments - the neuroses, the need for discipline, the compulsion to form. How does one tackle the metaphysics of the human face, the living anatomy, the stagnant psyche that refuses to paint? What is beautiful? (the answer will surprise you, but you must first draw or paint shrouded things, shadowed things, moving things, harsh, gross and edible things.)" - Ceramics SA
Author's Note: I invite you to read through The Mind's Eye: An Introduction to Making Images as a meditation salted with a couple of games. I wrote most of the exercises in a gossipy way so that they would slide into the text more or less unnoticed. The whole thing has turned out to be a rambling meditation on the pleasures and pain of art practice without any particular age group in mind.
Judith Mason (1938-2016) was a technically disciplined artist working in oil, pencil, printmaking and mixed media. Her work is rich in symbolism and mythology and displays a rare technical virtuosity. She taught art at Scoula Lorenzo de Medici, Florence, Italy, Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, the university of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and privately. Her work is represented in international private and public collections including Yale University; The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford and the National Museum of African Art, a Smithsonian Institute.Justice Albie Sachs considers Judith Mason's 'The Man Who Sang and the Woman Who Kept Silent' (in the Constitutional Court Collection) to be 'One of the great pieces of art in the world of the late 20th century."Artists Statement:"I paint in order to make sense of my life, to manipulate various chaotic fragments of information and impulse into some sort of order, through which I can glimpse a hint of meaning. I am an agnostic humanist possessed of religious curiosity who regards making artworks as akin to alchemy. To use inert matter on an inert surface to convey real energy and a presence seems to me to be a magical and privileged way of living out my days." and privileged way of living out my days."
