A career in pictures
I’ve been making images for most of my life.
My formal art education began at Chelsea School of Art in London. I came to Australia in 1967 and, like many young migrants, set about making a living from the skills I had acquired.
That eventually developed into a long career as a graphic designer and illustrator.
Over the years I worked on everything from packaging and advertising to corporate publications and promotional material. My studio grew into a Below-the-Line advertising agency, producing printed material and illustrations for substantial Australian and international clients.
Among the companies and brands I worked for were Coca-Cola Bottlers, Procter & Gamble Australia, J.I.
Case International, and Dunlop Slazenger.
These were commercial assignments. They had deadlines, budgets, specifications and, inevitably, somebody else’s idea of what the finished work should look like.
But they taught me my trade.
Learning to make an image work
Commercial design is an unforgiving teacher.
An illustration can be beautiful and still fail if it doesn’t communicate. A package has to attract attention
among dozens of competitors. A poster has to work from a distance. A piece of advertising has to
convey its message quickly.
Over the years I learned to think about composition, colour, scale, visual hierarchy and detail — not as
academic concepts, but as practical tools.
Those lessons have stayed with me.
When I paint today, I still think about how an image works as a whole.The difference is that now I choose the brief.
The Great Barrier Reef
My current work is dominated by the marine environment, particularly an imagined Great Barrier Reef.
My fascination with the underwater world isn’t theoretical. I spent years sailing, fishing and snorkelling
around the Whitsundays, and I have been a member of the Broken Bay Game Fishing Club.
Those experiences left me with a strong visual memory of the Australian marine environment — its
extraordinary colours, the way light behaves underwater, the movement of fish and the feeling of
looking into an environment that is both familiar and alien.
The Marine Series grew from that experience.
I don’t set out to reproduce a particular reef or make a scientific illustration.
Instead, I ask myself what might happen if these creatures occupied the same underwater world.
A turtle encounters a reef shark.
A manta ray moves through the blue.
A marlin hunts.
A shipwreck becomes part of the reef.
A grotto opens into darkness.
The individual subjects are grounded in observation, but the finished scene belongs to my imagination.
Getting the creatures right
I care about accuracy.
Before beginning many of my larger marine paintings, I make smaller studies of individual creatures.
These allow me to examine their anatomy, proportions, colouring and movement.
Only when I am satisfied with the individual subject do I bring it into a larger composition. This is one of the advantages of having spent a lifetime drawing.
I can alter the position of a creature, change its scale, adjust its movement or place it somewhere it
would never actually have been photographed — while still trying to make the viewer believe it belongs
there. The result sits somewhere between observation and imagination.
That is where I want it to sit.
My technique
I use brushes for detail and controlled passages, palette knives when I want a stronger physical surface and impasto, and airbrush techniques when they provide something that the other methods cannot.
I particularly enjoy the contrast between fine detail and heavily worked areas of paint.
A marine painting might contain tiny details in a fish’s scales alongside broad, almost abstract passages
of water and light.
That contrast keeps the work alive.
More than the reef
Although marine painting has become an important part of my work, I don’t regard myself solely as a
marine artist.
I continue to paint and draw landscapes, still life and abstract work.
After spending so many years working to commercial briefs, I have no wish to impose another set of
restrictions on myself.
Sometimes I want to paint something recognisable.
Sometimes I want to see how far I can push colour and form.
Sometimes an idea simply arrives and has to be painted.
A different kind of career
Looking back, my journey into fine art wasn’t planned.
I began as a trained young artist in London, became a commercial illustrator and designer in Australia,
built a business around visual communication, and eventually found myself returning to painting for
the simplest possible reason:
I wanted to paint.
There is a certain freedom in that.
No client.
No advertising deadline.
No marketing department.
Just an empty canvas and the question of what should happen next.
After a lifetime spent making images for other people, I rather enjoy that question.
Why I paint
I have never really stopped drawing or painting.
It is not something I do simply because I have spare time. Making images has been part of the way I
have understood the world for as long as I can remember.
There is always another idea.
Another painting.
Another technique to try.
Another problem to solve.
As I once put it:
“Any day that I don’t paint or draw something feels like a wasted day.”
I still believe that.
JOHN N MASON
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Any day that I don’t paint or draw something – feels like a wasted day.
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