I go to a blank canvas with a blank mind. I want to play with colors. I want to get a conversation going between and among the colors on the canvas. That is, I'll put one color down and then a second, and the second affects the first. I'll put an orange down, for example, next to a purple, and it will be too hot, so I'll cool it down. I look to see what the paint will do, how it will affect me and how it will change.

I want to avoid the static. I sometimes will be developing a painting and get stuck, so I'll turn it on its side or upside down just to get me unstuck. That's how you learn, by exploring, by staying unstuck.

—Emily Mason

Emily Mason (b. 1932), her mother Alice Trumbull Mason (1904-1971), and her daughter Cecily Kahn embody three generations of abstract painters, all based in New York City. She studied art at Bennington College in Vermont and subsequently at Cooper Union. She married artist Wolf Kahn in 1957. As a young artist in New York City in the 1950s she met and was influenced by many of the great artists of the day: Ilya Bolotowsky, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, to name a few. Mason has had numerous exhibitions of her work since her first one-person exhibition at New York's Area Gallery in 1960.  In 1979 she was awarded the Ranger Fund Purchase Prize by the National Academy. She has taught painting at Hunter College for more than 25 years, and her work is included in numerous public and private collections. She lives with her husband in New York City and has a home in Vermont.