With the professionalizing of the art industry, it has become dispiritingly routine for artists to present a résumé detailing their education and bona fides as carefully as a junior law associate would.

So it is somewhat refreshing to speak to Jason Mason about his circuitous path to his recent success as a painter. Technically, it started off conventionally, in Texas a half-century ago, when his mother, an artist, gave him pencils and paper and got him drawing before he could read and write, a skill he took to like a duck to water and practiced constantly, growing up. But when he was a teenager and his family moved to California, his attention and talents got captured by music. After school he joined a band, moved to L.A., and only used his art skills incidentally for the band’s posters and the like. It wasn’t until the late 90s, when a close friend, Ed Ruscha’s son Eddie, enlisted Mason to come in and start assisting his father in the studio, that his substantial innate facility with art materials bloomed once again.

His physical gift is remarkable: a kind of magnetically sur-hyper-photo-realist representational ability as a painter that, for the record, is not achieved with photos or artificial intelligence—all intelligence is his own. You may have to look closely to believe it. One of his paintings at his new show at The Journal Gallery in New York, a window-size close-up of the crown of a windblown palm tree against an eerie blood-red sky, is so photo-exact that you can hear the fronds rustle while the sky catches fire.

His attraction to opposites in scale is echoed by his imagery; many of his works contrast everyday objects in painstaking detail against a more cosmic natural backdrop, usually in ways that present a subtle, surreally perverse clash. A broom hovers in front of sand dunes. A hammer floats in front of the sea. The koan as painting.

His favorite is the wave: that epic Southern California symbol of both force and flow, of both forever and now. His new show features one surf-worthy monster that brings to mind everything from the Japanese painter Hokusai and the surfing safari movie Endless Summer. But with an ominous reddish sunset and a colorful smattering of the Pacific’s other current constant—empty bobbing soda bottles—Mason makes a beautiful wave into a harbinger of something other than good vibrations. “It’s interesting how some people really love the trash and some people don’t,” says the artist. “But I never wanted to paint postcards. And at this point in our society if you are not thinking about the end of the world, I do not know what you are thinking about.”

Not that he means the painting to be read as apocalyptic per se. First and foremost, he is after a sense of dissonance so present in modern life, rendered in perfect detail. So it’s perfect that his works are so rooted in the ironic soil of Southern California, a feeling he knows by heart, growing up in the hard-edged 90’s L.A. music scene.

And for the record, he doesn’t even like the beach. “I am terrified of the ocean,” he says. “I never learned to swim very well. I’m not that coordinated.”

His hand-eye coordination looks pretty good, though.

David Colman



Jason Mason was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1971.

His recent solo and group exhibitions include “Hollywood Dream Bubble: Ed Ruscha’s Influence in Los Angeles and Beyond” at The Hole in Los Angeles, California (2024); “Undercurrents” at ATM Gallery in New York, New York (2021); “Allegory of Painting” at WOAW Gallery in Wan Chai, Hong Kong (2020); and “Tools & Nails” at Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles, California (2020).

Mason lives and works in Los Angeles, California.