Meet Collette Mason, this week’s top American Watercolor Weekly Ambassador!
CMarie Northwest is a collection of work by award-winning artist: Collette Mason.
Collette’s artistic focus is watercolor. Her favorite subjects to paint are landscapes, people and animals. Her goal for each painting is to capture the mood or personality of the subject through a limited palette and use of light.
Collette loves working with watercolors because they challenge her to loosen up and trust that the paint will react as expected. On days when she’s not using watercolors Collette experiments with acrylics, spray paint, colored pencil or ink to create abstract, pop-culture, or illustration pieces.
Living in the Pacific Northwest has provided Collette with daily inspiration. It’s not uncommon for her to stop mid-sentence on a walk, take a picture and say, “Oh! That’s pretty!” or, “Look at how the light and shadows fall over there!”. Fortunately, her family is very patient and understanding when she gets sidetracked.
As a self-taught artist, Collette has drawn from these photos and her studies to develop her own approach for capturing the mood and character of the things that inspire her most. Her hope, when presenting her work, is that the viewer also sees the beauty that caught Collette’s attention and can feel the mood or personality of the subject through each piece.
Harborview Reminder is a painting based on the view from the trauma floor’s waiting room at Harborview Hospital in Seattle, WA. I was there with family in Spring 2019 under sad circumstances and when I looked out the skybridge there was this beautiful sunset highlighting Mt. Rainier. It resonated with me as a reminder that even in the darkest of times there are still beautiful things in the world if you just look up.
This is a painting of my daughter: Hannah. We were out at a cafe one day and she snagged my sunglasses (as she tends to do). I loved the way the light bounced off her features and she let me take a couple photos of her being “cool”. I knew I had to paint her and this piece was such a joy to work on!
PNW Morning is a painting based on boats found in Olympia, WA’s harbor. I traveled out one November morning, camera in hand, to get some reference photos and ended up surrounded by fog in this totally silent, still, eerie but peaceful space. I loved the feeling around me and the quietness of the boats on the water. My solitary goal with this painting was to convey the mood of that morning through my work.
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I like the mood in her paintings.