Meet February’s artist- Gail Mason

Gail Mason

Gail is another multi-award winning member and regular tutor at Spike Print Studio. You can see more of her work on her website www.gailmason.co.uk

Gail tends to work mainly in screenprint, producing work ranging from large expressive painterly abstract monoprints, to smaller flat colour edition work and most recently monochrome portraits. The positive impact of colour has been her main inspiration together with the idea of journeys both literal and metaphorical.  She has spent a long time producing painterly monotypes through her silkscreen prints, because she love the chance surprise element and then figuring out the next step rather than having everything mapped out from the start.

‘It’s rather like a dance where you have to be intuitive and allow yourself to move instinctively. I have also been working with oil-based monotypes, for pretty much the same reason, but the colours I seem to mix in oil are more subdued and atmospheric.

Gail Mason lives in semi rural North Somerset with her husband and daughter, surrounded by cows, sheep and cats. During the 80’s Gail had her own business designing, producing, printing and painting clothes for her stall at Camden Market.

Following on from an MA in Print, Gail is now based here at Spike Print Studios in Bristol where she makes work for Galleries, Exhibition and the Corporate World. She loves working there with other printmakers, where she can bounce ideas around, have a laugh and be sociable, as well as working.  Gail has won several Fine Art prizes over the last few years, including the Venue Emerging Artist Prize at the RWA, the Curwen Studio prize with a silkscreen monoprint at Originals and the Bath society of Artists Graphic Prize. The Curwen Studio prize from Originals enabled Gail to begin to explore the off-set oil based monotype process and she would love to have the time to develop this process further.

Gail has worked part time for the last 13 years as a lecturer and tutor on the Degree Courses at a local HE college, teaching all kinds of printmaking to Graphics and Fine Art students. She runs Silkscreen Monotype workshops here at Spike Print Studio and in the studio space where she lives.

‘It’s been an interesting journey. I dropped out of my A level art and consequently didn’t go straight to Art College from school, instead did a Psychology and Education degree. After Camden I decided to return to education to study Fine Art and then later completed an MA in Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking. I took the long way round….   

Gail’s work was on sale in Bristol at Print Shop Bristol during July and August. Future exhibitions include;

Chestnut Farm Cheddar 6/7/8 Sept with Tina Hill and Sara Parsons

Solo Show at Café Maitreya Bristol from 25 Sept – Jan 2014

‘Horizons’ Sidcot Exhibition Centre with ID Artists from 25th October – 3rd Nov

Bath Society of Artists Annual Show 7th – 20th October at Bath Royal Scientific and Literary Museum Bath

Text by by Anna Harley