MASON BURNS
@artistmasonburnsI paint still lifes with items taken from my object library gifted to me by my grandmother. My grandma is a photographer, who often crafts arrangements for me to paint. These compositions consist of natural, ephemeral objects that she finds walking around her small Rhode Island town. These quiet arrangements represent the beauty she finds in the local environment. I shift the scale of these images depending on the size of the object I’m painting, from small and delicate to large and unavoidable. I often paint to scale in an effort to create the illusion that these objects are in the room with the viewer. I memorialize these objects on
canvas—like shrines—as a removed version of worship to my grandmother. Glimmering, perfect, and untouchable, I want these objects to sit in a world that defies the way time would normally decay them.
My work is an autobiographical and fleeting take on still life and portraiture. I paint about myself and my grandmother in a diaristic form, and I reference many of my grandmother’s photographs and objects she has collected over her lifetime. Through these subjects, I juxtapose day and night, explore the carrying capacity of memory, and unpack what it feels like to be young, overwhelmed, and afraid to let things go.
Her Trophy Case, 72 x 36, acrylic on panel, 2024
Resurrection Spell, 28 x 28, oil on canvas, 2024
Things from Her Collection #1, Things from Her Collection #2,
acrylic on panel, 11 x 14, 2023