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Artist and musician Roger Mason moves studio into Chatham’s clock tower
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| Artist Roger Mason, surrounded by some of pieces, sits in his studio in the clock tower in the village of Chatham. Sesame Campbell/Chatham Courier |
By Sesame Campbell
CHATHAM — It has been 14 years since Roger Mason did a 10-year stint on the second floor of the clock tower. Those were the early years of his career, before he became sort of famous. Now, having recently returned from Los Angeles after his friend’s, actor David Carradine’s, funeral, the painter and musician has set up his studio on the third floor of the Chatham clock tower.
Mason has Burt Freed, who recently called him, to thank for his return to the clock tower.
“Hi Roger, this is Burt Freed. Didn’t you have the third floor in the clock tower as your studio a few years ago?” Mason responded that he had a space on the second floor.
“Because Burt has a sense of humor, I’m back,” Mason said.
Mason is a man who knows how to tell a good story. What is interesting about his stories is that they are true. He does not name drop for the sake of getting an envious sigh from his listeners. What he does is share stories about his friends, most who can be read about in magazines or watched on TV.
Take this story for instance: “In 1988, I was painting in Provence, France. A guy came out of the darkness and said, ‘you’re painting with a light on your head.’ The guy ended up buying a painting and paid for my whole trip. He was sort of my mentor.” That guy turned out to be the famous Canadian sculptor Jim Ritchie.
His stories begin with his larger-than-life father, a World War II hero.
“I just lost him a few years ago but it took me my whole life to figure him out,” Mason said of the 6-foot, 4-inch paratrooper who jumped out of a plane into machine gun fire in Normandy and later out of a truck during the Battle of the Bulge.
Mason carries a piece of his father’s parachute in his wallet. His father rarely spoke to anyone about his experiences in the war, but before his father died, Mason wanted him to talk about it, so his father told him a couple of stories.
“He told me about jumping out of the plane at 600 feet and seeing bullets going through the floor of the plane. And about planes going down in flames and knowing that there were guys in those planes who were dying. What really freaked him out was opening the gates of the Dachau concentration camp. I remember he told me he could smell the camp 10 miles away.”
Mason’s father also received a citation for going behind enemy lines and mining a bridge on the Salm River in Belgium. “He fell in the water and it was 10 degrees below zero outside,” he said. “When the bridge blew up, witnesses said that thing went a mile high.”
It took Mason 50 years to understand his father, who was featured in Time Magazine and the New York Times as one of the troops walking in Normandy in June 1944. In the photo, six men are walking. It turned out that only his father survived.
Mason’s dad had always wanted to be a painter.
“When he was in Holland, he landed in a guy’s back yard and hid in a foxhole for a month. The guy who’s foxhole he was in taught him how to paint. I remember smelling the smell of paints. My father and I were closer than I thought, even though I was the bad boy,” he mused.
Neither of Mason’s brothers was interested in painting. He recalls polishing his father’s parachute boots, but one day he threw everything out. “I wasn’t even allowed to have a BB gun growing up,” he said.
When his father passed away in December 2004, Mason recalls having dizzy spells. “I felt him dying,” he said. “We were really connected. I’m still processing it.”
Much to his mother’s chagrin, Mason first knew he was going to be a painter when he was 8. His dad gave him his oil paints and he would do comic book characters. “I tried to paint a tree and it didn’t work,” he said.
The connection between art and music has been intertwined most of Mason’s life. Although he studied art at Pratt Institute, he had already begun his music career.
It was competition combined with an illness that started him on the serious path to music. During his teens, he came down with mono and was out of school for almost a year. His father gave him a beautiful Gibson guitar. Mason played it day and night and by the time he emerged from his illness, he was a skinny, gaunt teenager who knew how to play a guitar. He played in his first band when he was 14 years old with musician Mark Johnson and ended up trading his guitar for a bass. Johnson had given Mason a music career.
From the age of 14 on, Mason played music gigs with various bands. “It saved me from a home life with mom drinking 15 pots of coffee a day with a three-pack Chester cigarette habit and dad with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder),” he said. His mother later died from emphysema, denying all along that cigarettes had nothing to do with her emphysema.
Art school was not easy for Mason. While everyone else was flinging paint at their canvasses, he looked out the window and watched as raindrops dried on the copper roof. It started his preoccupation with realism.
He always loved music and painting simultaneously. To Mason, it seemed that they involved the same part of his brain.
“I remember a guy asking me as I was packing up to leave art school if I was going to be a painter or a musician. I said I didn’t know. I still don’t. Each one compliments the other.”
The music has been fun for him, while painting has always been work, in part because his sense of reality is always changing.
Among the musical giants Mason has played with are Bob Dylan, Itzhak Perlman, John Denver, members of The Band, the Carradine Brothers and even Larry Campbell, who produced Levon Helm, to name a few.
“My last gig with Rick Danko was a week before he died and we sang, ‘Start it all over again,’ he said. Mason swears that the day Danko died he heard the song on the radio and recalls an eerie feeling that came over him as crackling sounds took over the words of the song.
For 13 years, Mason played music on Broadway for shows such as “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” “The Robber Bridegroom” and “Fox Fire,” where he met Keith Carradine and the late Jessica Tandy, who became surrogate parents to the young musician/artist.
“She used to run her fingers in my hair and call me Sampson,” he recalls of Tandy.
Mason first blew through Chatham in 1968. Chatham had an anachronistic sense to him. Although it was in the 1970s, it seemed to him that this little town was still in the late 1940s, early 1950s.
Mason tells the story of Jack Palladino, the local butcher, giving him a wooden tray and Sarina Bromberg, the sister of guitarist David Bromberg gave him the easel. He realized this would all fit in his 1963 Chevy.
“I went out and started to use it,” he said. “Sculptor Steve Day would come up and watch me paint. It took me a long time to figure out was I was doing, especially with the night paintings I did under mercury vapor lamplight. I had no idea of what colors I was using. I wasn’t taking it seriously when I was doing it, but when I put it under incandescent light it took on a life of its own.”
He sold his first painting to Tandy when he was working on Broadway. He painted with emotion, rather than any specific technique. People would drive by and hoot and holler at him, but he kept on painting. Now he makes a living as a painter, but ask him how it happened and he’ll say he doesn’t know.
Mason played a July 4th party with Garth Hudson and Randy Ciarlante, members of the band, The Band. He also just recorded a project with Robert Carradine, David’s younger brother, who did his first movie with John Wayne when he was 16, called “Cowboys,” and Lamont De Pew, in a private studio in Chatham.
Mason was represented in Colorado by a woman who used to work for Elvis Presley and in the past 15 years, his paintings have appeared in the living rooms of the likes of the head of the New York Commodities and Exchange Commission, the CEOs of ATT, Ford Motor Company, the Weather Channel, eBay, Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Outback Steakhouse, Jack Chrysler, Robert Altman, Rex Harrison, Daryl Hannah and his favorite lawyer in the world, who’s office was in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
“Fortunately, the paintings weren’t in the building when it collapsed,” he said. “She moved them six weeks before the buildings went down.”
Throughout the years, Mason sold paintings out of his studio in Chatham and traveled throughout the United States and Europe to paint scenes he found stimulating.
“[Chatham] was always home; that was always the office,” he said of the places he traveled to. “There are a lot of people I like here, although many of the old timers are gone now.”
People like George Krause, Ted Thayer and Aldythe “Teddy” Curtis, who would come up behind Mason while he was painting on Main Street and say, “Hello, chickadee!” Joan Diskin was the mayor of Chatham and Cliffy Hodge was the then editor of the Chatham Courier. He would report on village ghost stories. Bud Peister owned the Sunoco station and would report yesterday’s weather. And Bobby Watts Jewelers had windup watches from the 1950s that he sold at 1950s prices.
“Thank God Kevin and Paul Boehme are still around. They’re one of the relics like me,” he said. “Like Richie Kraham, Al Ross and Risley at Park Row Gallery.”
He remembers when Video Visions was part of Capozzo’s general store, where the smell of pastries and gun oil was in the air. He recalls the sound of the screen door closing on Hess’s meat market. And he still remembers when trains used to stop at the train station.
Ask him what is happening with the traffic circle and Mason says he still doesn’t know. But he is glad that Butchie Lippera is still in business. “I painted the Chatham Hotel over 30 times,” he said. “It was like my Taj Mahal.”
The liquor store on Church Street was the first outdoor location Mason painted. He moved on to Delson’s Department Store. The Delson sign is in his basement. It’s one of his quirks: He always walks away with a souvenir of a place he paints.
The reason he paints on sight is because he has no memory whatsoever. “I don’t know how to operate a camera, still,” he said.
An entire generation of painters has been impacted by his work. Like his father, Mason has appeared in the New York Times and Microsoft featured him in an article before he even owned a computer. He has painted in France, Cuba, Colorado, Tahiti, Corsica, had a great show in the Netherlands, painted all over Buenos Aires and Mexico and said that Key West was good. Tuscany was great and he’d like to go back to Tokyo and stay for a while. While in New Mexico, Mason came close to experiencing his own version of God. And if all goes well, he intends to be the first painter on the moon.
“Can you imagine those night scenes with the earth rising?” he asks.
Mason’s son, “little Roger,” jokes that in another 10 years, his father will be in the belfry. But for now, he has moved from the second to the third floor. And everywhere there is light or darkness outside and he sits with a signature cigar, preferably Cuban.
For more information or to see Mason’s work, visit www.rogermason.net.
Mason has Burt Freed, who recently called him, to thank for his return to the clock tower.
“Hi Roger, this is Burt Freed. Didn’t you have the third floor in the clock tower as your studio a few years ago?” Mason responded that he had a space on the second floor.
“Because Burt has a sense of humor, I’m back,” Mason said.
Mason is a man who knows how to tell a good story. What is interesting about his stories is that they are true. He does not name drop for the sake of getting an envious sigh from his listeners. What he does is share stories about his friends, most who can be read about in magazines or watched on TV.
Take this story for instance: “In 1988, I was painting in Provence, France. A guy came out of the darkness and said, ‘you’re painting with a light on your head.’ The guy ended up buying a painting and paid for my whole trip. He was sort of my mentor.” That guy turned out to be the famous Canadian sculptor Jim Ritchie.
His stories begin with his larger-than-life father, a World War II hero.
“I just lost him a few years ago but it took me my whole life to figure him out,” Mason said of the 6-foot, 4-inch paratrooper who jumped out of a plane into machine gun fire in Normandy and later out of a truck during the Battle of the Bulge.
Mason carries a piece of his father’s parachute in his wallet. His father rarely spoke to anyone about his experiences in the war, but before his father died, Mason wanted him to talk about it, so his father told him a couple of stories.
“He told me about jumping out of the plane at 600 feet and seeing bullets going through the floor of the plane. And about planes going down in flames and knowing that there were guys in those planes who were dying. What really freaked him out was opening the gates of the Dachau concentration camp. I remember he told me he could smell the camp 10 miles away.”
Mason’s father also received a citation for going behind enemy lines and mining a bridge on the Salm River in Belgium. “He fell in the water and it was 10 degrees below zero outside,” he said. “When the bridge blew up, witnesses said that thing went a mile high.”
It took Mason 50 years to understand his father, who was featured in Time Magazine and the New York Times as one of the troops walking in Normandy in June 1944. In the photo, six men are walking. It turned out that only his father survived.
Mason’s dad had always wanted to be a painter.
“When he was in Holland, he landed in a guy’s back yard and hid in a foxhole for a month. The guy who’s foxhole he was in taught him how to paint. I remember smelling the smell of paints. My father and I were closer than I thought, even though I was the bad boy,” he mused.
Neither of Mason’s brothers was interested in painting. He recalls polishing his father’s parachute boots, but one day he threw everything out. “I wasn’t even allowed to have a BB gun growing up,” he said.
When his father passed away in December 2004, Mason recalls having dizzy spells. “I felt him dying,” he said. “We were really connected. I’m still processing it.”
Much to his mother’s chagrin, Mason first knew he was going to be a painter when he was 8. His dad gave him his oil paints and he would do comic book characters. “I tried to paint a tree and it didn’t work,” he said.
The connection between art and music has been intertwined most of Mason’s life. Although he studied art at Pratt Institute, he had already begun his music career.
It was competition combined with an illness that started him on the serious path to music. During his teens, he came down with mono and was out of school for almost a year. His father gave him a beautiful Gibson guitar. Mason played it day and night and by the time he emerged from his illness, he was a skinny, gaunt teenager who knew how to play a guitar. He played in his first band when he was 14 years old with musician Mark Johnson and ended up trading his guitar for a bass. Johnson had given Mason a music career.
From the age of 14 on, Mason played music gigs with various bands. “It saved me from a home life with mom drinking 15 pots of coffee a day with a three-pack Chester cigarette habit and dad with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder),” he said. His mother later died from emphysema, denying all along that cigarettes had nothing to do with her emphysema.
Art school was not easy for Mason. While everyone else was flinging paint at their canvasses, he looked out the window and watched as raindrops dried on the copper roof. It started his preoccupation with realism.
He always loved music and painting simultaneously. To Mason, it seemed that they involved the same part of his brain.
“I remember a guy asking me as I was packing up to leave art school if I was going to be a painter or a musician. I said I didn’t know. I still don’t. Each one compliments the other.”
The music has been fun for him, while painting has always been work, in part because his sense of reality is always changing.
Among the musical giants Mason has played with are Bob Dylan, Itzhak Perlman, John Denver, members of The Band, the Carradine Brothers and even Larry Campbell, who produced Levon Helm, to name a few.
“My last gig with Rick Danko was a week before he died and we sang, ‘Start it all over again,’ he said. Mason swears that the day Danko died he heard the song on the radio and recalls an eerie feeling that came over him as crackling sounds took over the words of the song.
For 13 years, Mason played music on Broadway for shows such as “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” “The Robber Bridegroom” and “Fox Fire,” where he met Keith Carradine and the late Jessica Tandy, who became surrogate parents to the young musician/artist.
“She used to run her fingers in my hair and call me Sampson,” he recalls of Tandy.
Mason first blew through Chatham in 1968. Chatham had an anachronistic sense to him. Although it was in the 1970s, it seemed to him that this little town was still in the late 1940s, early 1950s.
Mason tells the story of Jack Palladino, the local butcher, giving him a wooden tray and Sarina Bromberg, the sister of guitarist David Bromberg gave him the easel. He realized this would all fit in his 1963 Chevy.
“I went out and started to use it,” he said. “Sculptor Steve Day would come up and watch me paint. It took me a long time to figure out was I was doing, especially with the night paintings I did under mercury vapor lamplight. I had no idea of what colors I was using. I wasn’t taking it seriously when I was doing it, but when I put it under incandescent light it took on a life of its own.”
He sold his first painting to Tandy when he was working on Broadway. He painted with emotion, rather than any specific technique. People would drive by and hoot and holler at him, but he kept on painting. Now he makes a living as a painter, but ask him how it happened and he’ll say he doesn’t know.
Mason played a July 4th party with Garth Hudson and Randy Ciarlante, members of the band, The Band. He also just recorded a project with Robert Carradine, David’s younger brother, who did his first movie with John Wayne when he was 16, called “Cowboys,” and Lamont De Pew, in a private studio in Chatham.
Mason was represented in Colorado by a woman who used to work for Elvis Presley and in the past 15 years, his paintings have appeared in the living rooms of the likes of the head of the New York Commodities and Exchange Commission, the CEOs of ATT, Ford Motor Company, the Weather Channel, eBay, Time Warner, Goldman Sachs, Outback Steakhouse, Jack Chrysler, Robert Altman, Rex Harrison, Daryl Hannah and his favorite lawyer in the world, who’s office was in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
“Fortunately, the paintings weren’t in the building when it collapsed,” he said. “She moved them six weeks before the buildings went down.”
Throughout the years, Mason sold paintings out of his studio in Chatham and traveled throughout the United States and Europe to paint scenes he found stimulating.
“[Chatham] was always home; that was always the office,” he said of the places he traveled to. “There are a lot of people I like here, although many of the old timers are gone now.”
People like George Krause, Ted Thayer and Aldythe “Teddy” Curtis, who would come up behind Mason while he was painting on Main Street and say, “Hello, chickadee!” Joan Diskin was the mayor of Chatham and Cliffy Hodge was the then editor of the Chatham Courier. He would report on village ghost stories. Bud Peister owned the Sunoco station and would report yesterday’s weather. And Bobby Watts Jewelers had windup watches from the 1950s that he sold at 1950s prices.
“Thank God Kevin and Paul Boehme are still around. They’re one of the relics like me,” he said. “Like Richie Kraham, Al Ross and Risley at Park Row Gallery.”
He remembers when Video Visions was part of Capozzo’s general store, where the smell of pastries and gun oil was in the air. He recalls the sound of the screen door closing on Hess’s meat market. And he still remembers when trains used to stop at the train station.
Ask him what is happening with the traffic circle and Mason says he still doesn’t know. But he is glad that Butchie Lippera is still in business. “I painted the Chatham Hotel over 30 times,” he said. “It was like my Taj Mahal.”
The liquor store on Church Street was the first outdoor location Mason painted. He moved on to Delson’s Department Store. The Delson sign is in his basement. It’s one of his quirks: He always walks away with a souvenir of a place he paints.
The reason he paints on sight is because he has no memory whatsoever. “I don’t know how to operate a camera, still,” he said.
An entire generation of painters has been impacted by his work. Like his father, Mason has appeared in the New York Times and Microsoft featured him in an article before he even owned a computer. He has painted in France, Cuba, Colorado, Tahiti, Corsica, had a great show in the Netherlands, painted all over Buenos Aires and Mexico and said that Key West was good. Tuscany was great and he’d like to go back to Tokyo and stay for a while. While in New Mexico, Mason came close to experiencing his own version of God. And if all goes well, he intends to be the first painter on the moon.
“Can you imagine those night scenes with the earth rising?” he asks.
Mason’s son, “little Roger,” jokes that in another 10 years, his father will be in the belfry. But for now, he has moved from the second to the third floor. And everywhere there is light or darkness outside and he sits with a signature cigar, preferably Cuban.
For more information or to see Mason’s work, visit www.rogermason.net.
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