This episode explores the life and work of abstract painter Emily Mason, who, in the wake of her death in 2019, publication of a first 2025 monograph and first Paris exhibition, is experiencing a huge surge of interest internationally and has been labeled an 'American genius' by The New Yorker magazine. The 38-minute piece is broken down into sections detailed below featuring interviews with Mason’s daughter Melany Kahn and Steven Rose, Mason’s former studio manager and current executive director of the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation, and the voice of Emily Mason herself thanks to various archived tapes previously unavailable to the public. The discussion covers Mason's artistic journey from the 1950s until her death, her deep connection to both New York City and Brattleboro, Vermont, and her significant but under recognized contributions to abstract expressionism. Key topics include her approach to her work where she struggled to ‘get herself out of the way,’ her relationship to her namesake, poet Emily Dickinson, the 2025 publication of her comprehensive monograph "Emily Mason: Unknown to Possibility" by Rizzoli, her first Paris exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery, and her philanthropic legacy in Brattleboro including support for the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC). The episode also delves into her family background, including her relationship to her mother, Alice Trumbull Mason (also an abstract painter), and the family’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction, her long marriage to painter Wolf Kahn, her 30-year teaching career at Hunter College, and her printmaking work. The podcast concludes with details about her death and burial at her Vermont farm and her daughter’s reading of Dickinson’s poem "Hope is the Thing with Feathers." See time stamps for guide through sections: Introduction (0-4:30) “American Genius” Mason defies categorization as interest in her work surges internationally / deep bonds to Brattleboro and New York City Section One: (4:30) Mason’s Artistic Methods and Practice Section Two (13:00) Mason’s Life, Work and Relationships in Brattleboro Section Three: (20:10) Mason’s Early Life, Education, Teaching and Family Life Section Four (29:00) Mason’s Dedication to Mother Alice Trumbull Mason’s Legacy Section Five (31:40) Mason’s End of Life and Legacy
This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast was written and produced by Lissa Weinmann. Commentators were Steven Rose and Melany Kahn. Archival footage of the voice of Emily Mason was provided by the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation. Podcast editors are Matt Hall and Alec Pombriant. Sound design is by Dave Snyder, and mastering was done by Guilford Sound. Music is from Marlboro, Vermont, based Red Heart the Ticker, that's Ty Gibbons and Robin MacArthur, from their album “Tigers of the New England Forest”. Vermont folk musician Margaret MacArthur's “Mother in the Graveyard” was performed with permission by Anna and Elizabeth. Brattleboro Words Trail theme music is by Ty Gibbons. Special thanks to Brattleboro Community Television for all their help.
MORGAN ENGLISH POEM: Morgan English reading her poem: "Emily, Or to Light, Once Again.' Produced by Lissa Weinmann at BCTV for Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
PHOTO: Caption: Emily Mason by Phong Bui, ca.1987.
BRATTLEBORO WORDS TRAIL PODCAST: EMILY MASON, TRANSCRIPT
PODCAST HOST LISSA WEINMANN: Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail podcast.
CARL FORTESS voice on archival tape: Emily Mason, do you make any distinction between in painting the figurative kind of painting and the non-figurative? How do you think of yourself? How would you best describe your work if you had to find the…?
EMILY MASON: That's very.. it's difficult to put into words. It's… well, I'm an abstract painter. I try to work with color and imagination and forms and balance. And I work till… I know when a painting is finished if it has a certain quality of magic. I mean, I don't, I don't work directly from something, I work for something that's sort of inside me.
FORTESS: Can you be a little more specific about what you mean by “magic?”
MASON: It's just when a painting gives you a certain kick, when it's a certain… when something actually happens that's just a little bit further out than you’ve done before, something that begins to make the painting have a certain sense of life, a certain spark, a certain quality, you know?, that you didn't know was there, and then it happens.
FORTESS: by way of a fairly clear statement of how you work and what your attitude is.
MASON: I don't know if it's clear at all.
FORTESS: Well, it makes sense.
MASON: I don't know whether it makes sense… I look at my paintings, I see they've got bright colors, and they seem to have movements in them, and I don't know if I can really convey that just talking.
STEVEN ROSE: If you're looking at an Emily Mason painting, you're looking at lyrical abstraction, you have abstract expressionism, you have color field. Those have all been used to describe Emily's paintings. I think they sit in their own place though. So while she's being put into these maybe art historical traditions, she really finds her own voice, and she's very singular in that way.
I'm Steven Rose, and I am the director of the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation. I worked with Emily Mason for 10 years, starting in 2010 all the way until her passing in 2019.
It was funny when The New Yorker article came out and used the word genius to describe Emily. I just couldn't help but wonder what she would have thought about hearing the word “genius” applied to her work. Emily was an incredibly confident painter, but she wasn't an egoist, you know? She wanted to let the paintings do the speaking. In that way, she was incredibly humble. Is the world finally recognizing Emily Mason? Yes, it's hard for me to encapsulate exactly how much, because it is huge.
MELANY KAHN: Since my mother's death, her work has found an audience much deeper than it did when she was alive. Her auction market is very, very strong.
I'm Melany Kahn. I am the daughter of Emily Mason, the painter, and also Wolf Kahn, the painter.
You can see the evolution of her voice through her paintings. Even though it was experimental and unique, and not always commercially viable early on, she never ever strayed from it, and that sort of discipline and self-confidence is recognized now. The arc of the work, it really speaks very much for itself.
ROSE: Emily split her time between New York City and Brattleboro, Vermont. She loved the friction and the attention and all of the energy that is a New York City person, but she felt it was really important to be able to decant, and going to Brattleboro brought a whole level, a different level of energy. Emily used to call it ‘healing Vermont’. She loved everything about it. I still meet people in Brattleboro who, when I tell them what I do, have a story to tell me about Emily to this day, and I, you know, that says to me that her impact has been long lasting,
KAHN: Vermont, especially Brattleboro, jived in a way that I don't think many other places on this planet would have been such a good fit.
MUSIC (4:30) Section One: Mason’s Artistic Methods and Practice
MASON: I'm probably a product of abstract expressionism, and I think the basis of that is not knowing, and of course, John Cage says “Get your mind out of the way,” When I start a canvas, I like the blankness of it, you know, and then establishing colors, and the conversation between colors. It's not even that formal, I mean, it just.. I think some of it is generated by the material itself.
ROSE: That New Yorker article refers to Emily's use of color as her own form of storytelling, and I think that's very true. If you look at a painting, your eyes travel around the painting, and it doesn't settle in any one particular place. It's a story that unfolds over time. I think there's a kinship to nature, to how nature develops in its habitat, so how a flower grows, how plants grow, how they find their space in a garden. Emily's very much a conduit for this type of energy. What she does is she takes the time and pushes away all the preconceptions. She did yoga, she did meditation, she found ways of just taking herself into places of boredom and repose that allowed her to look at a canvas freshly and with new eyes. It was a struggle, and that's what's important, is that you struggle, you do your best, you find it.
KAHN: God, what she was doing was so hard, it took such skill and, and such an effort to ‘get out of one's way’, as she would have said.
MASON: I start, like, with a drawing and paint, and I start, then I start working with color, and very often I work flat on the floor, so that I can work fairly loose and runny, and almost like watercolor. And I blot a lot, and I take off. It's a process of addition and subtraction, I sort of put it down, and then I take some of it off, and then I start building it up, and then the painting starts to take a hold, and it starts to talk to you, and says “This is what I need”, you know? Or sometimes you know it, but you can't do it. You have to get over that. Yeah, I sort of plug in, and then I take things as they come.
ROSE: Emily was almost a conceptualist about media. She wanted to stretch oil paint, in particular, to its maximum abilities. She worked with paint makers like Robert Gamblin to unearth what the properties of paint can do. She studied her own pigment making herself. She was an alchemist. She liked to see what she could do with these materials. Emily would always have a few irons in the fire. She would have a few canvases going on her walls. She'd have an oil on clay board sitting on her window sill. She had some oils on paper in a corner on a desk. She would work on her paintings and printmaking simultaneously.
MUSIC
Time was important to Emily, and work was important to Emily. Making an art piece was work. You go to your space to work every single day. Now, the definition of what that might mean varied, right? That could mean sitting out of work and looking at it and letting your mind wander for an hour on end. It could also mean organizing old paintings that you hadn't looked at for 30 years, which I did with her often. It could mean going to a print studio to work with a master printmaker on thinking about new ideas and ways of printmaking. What was super important was the constant nature of the work.
I'm still trying to unpack how Emily illuminates a painting from within, that it almost gives off a light of its own, which makes them really hard to photograph! Emily would achieve light through time. She would apply very opaque layers, sometimes, and then very transparent layers, and this veiling, this layering would lead us to a painting that is giving you its sense of light through itself.
MUSIC
Emily had three books, starting with a very popular book called “The Fifth Element” that came out in 2005 and that was the red book. There was a small monograph, it covered work that was from the beginning all the way up until 2004 and then she did a follow-up to that, because she realized she had done so much work between 2005 and 2014 with “A Light in Spring”, which is a blue book, and then posthumously we created a yellow book that we called “Unknown to Possibility”, and that was published by Rizzoli in September of 2025. The title “Unknown to Possibility” comes from the name of a painting called “Unknown to Possibility”, which was a gorgeous yellow painting, but it also comes from a line of an Emily Dickinson poem. Emily Dickinson was Emily's namesake and also, I would say, a muse for Emily.
MASON: I love her use of language, and often use her phrases in my titles. When I read one of her poems, it sort of feeds me. I can't recite them all, but I know this book called “Light in Spring”, and I think it begins, "Light exists in Spring, not present in the year, nor at any other season when March is scarcely here.” * Just love that. Then it goes on: “Color stands abroad on solitary fields that science cannot take apart, but human nature feels.” She nails it every time! (NOTE: Mason was quoting from memory. The actual test from the Emily Dickinson poem “Light in Spring” reads: A Light exists in Spring / Not present on the Year / At any other period / When March is scarcely here // A Color stands abroad / On Solitary Fields / That Science cannot overtake / But Human Nature feels.)
KAHN: “Unknown to Possibility” is about her relationship to painting, where she would start with this idea of everything being unknown, and then possibility emerging through the process of painting that I think is what is captured so beautifully in this book that Stephen spearheaded, unknown to possibility was released fall of 2025 to accompany Emily's first show in Paris at Almine Rech Gallery, which is going to now be showing Emily's work abroad, which we're of course ecstatic about
MASON: When you see your paintings all in a room, they just take on a whole different, they start doing something to each other. Like the whole show will have like a certain color or a certain life to it, and they just sort of bounce one off the other; they're on their own. It says this work of body, body of work is, and work of body is out, you know, on its own, and it's, yeah, it's a cutting of an umbilical cord in a way.
ROSE: She liked that little turn of phrase “work of body and body of work.” She would pick canvases that were close to her proximity, close to her body size, that she could move around. She loved that about her work, that is something that she can handle herself. She also used to describe her paintings as children. It was a metaphor, but it was also something I think she sometimes took quite literally.
MASON: I’m just as glad just to keep on doing and exploring my own world, like the writer says, we are an inchworm at the end of a leaf, you know, sort of feeling out into space. I'd rather have that quality than feel I'm part of a bigger movement or group.
MUSIC
BREAK: Section Two (13:00) Mason’s Life, Work and Relationships in Brattleboro
KAHN: My parents bought what I now call Stark Farm from only its second owner after John Stark, the original farmer, in 1968. It had only a hand pump in the sink that brought the water from the gravity-fed barrel in, very cold from the springs, it had a wood stove in the kitchen, kerosene lamps, a party line, and they loved it, and they loved living in that simplicity.
MASON: There was a choice between this or Maine, but Brattleboro has, and Vermont has more going on. We would be in a summer colony, or just summer people up in Maine, Vermont has something, it's the people, it’s very, it's very special here. But one of my things about Maine, you know, you couldn't run around naked, not that we're always running around naked, but I mean, just see if you have that illusion, you could do it, you know? I mean, the old farmer who built this house, the sun rises right in the equinox, right between the mountains there, and I mean he sited the thing so beautifully. It's really, you come to appreciate how people thought those days.
KAHN: So my parents split their time between New York and Vermont, and I think as painters that was very important to start campuses in Vermont, where the muse is right at your doorstep, and then bring them down to the city and work on them in the interior space of the of the studio to quote unquote finish them, and there was a big huge moving truck that they would hire at both ends of the trip, and in May it would come up filled with my mother's orchids and plants and whatever else she wanted to bring, and a truck full of gessoed white canvases in all different sizes, and on the way home, said plants, now twice as big and very happy and healthy, would get put back into the truck and sent down with canvases that were no longer white, and that went on exactly in that manner for probably 40 years.
MASON: The fact of nature that's Vermont …I was thinking about this this morning. If I could stress how important Vermont is for me. It sustains in a beautiful way.
KAHN: My mother used her time at the farm in the summer like a sacred workspace. She found her muse there, she found her uninterrupted painting time there. She really treasured it and was very disciplined about it. So it was quite hard to get her off the mountain once she was up there, and all the ways in which she interacted with nature in Vermont show up in the depth of the layers of color in her canvases.
My mother took over the blacksmith's studio slash chicken coop and turned it into her painting studio. Over the years, she added a small addition to the back, where she put in a wood stove, so that she could paint early in the spring and late into the fall. My dad was first up in the barn, and then built himself a studio down in our pasture, so they painted quite far away from each other at the farm. Eventually, same thing with New York, and then they were just a block away from each other and painting in their own space.
They often would invite people to visit, or they'd get a lot of calls of people wanting to come through town, and they strategically would invite them to lunch, because they had to stop for lunch anyway, and they would serve them some sort of soup and salad, and cheese, and bread, and have a lovely lingering lunch, and then they would promptly hasten them away and say bye, they're going back to their studios.
I would go out there in her studio sometimes with her and read or listen to the radio with her. She was abhorrently against television, and so no TV. My parents were very clear that when they were out in their studios, you know, you could go visit them and things, but they were, they were working
MUSIC
Up the road from us on Stark Road, we had Orv Wright, the world-renowned potter, who was wood firing ceramics, and he and my mother had a very deep relationship, in which they traded work. She had a very keen eye and sensibility for all the other work that was being created within a very small mileage radius of our farm.
Summers were spent deeply immersed in the cultural 70s and 80s of Brattleboro, which were rich and intoxicatingly contagious, as far as you know, poor artists, when I say poor, I mean, you know, they didn't have a lot of wealth, but they were rich in sharing their culture and their crafts with one another. So her relationship with Brattleboro, not only with the other artists, but with the institutions that supported them, was deep and vast.
She supported the Brattleboro Museum when it was still a train station. It was a beautiful historic building, and my mother had a particularly deep love of trains, so they were approached by a group of people that were looking to save that station and turn it into an art museum, and they immediately recognized the benefit of that to the town, and along with just a handful, really, of folks started on quite a shoestring budget and created the museum rather than let the train station get torn down. I think that was one of my mother's most happy legacies in Brattleboro.
ROSE: (18:49) The Brattleboro Museum was a venue, was a place that they could, they can make their artistic voice be known, you know, as a place for conversation. Wolf would give lectures, Emily would give lectures. It was a gathering space, and that's what they wanted out of it. We had a wonderful retrospective up there with that, curated by Mara Williams. During Emily's lifetime, they wanted to start and eventually enter into the contemporary discourse of what's happening, even down here in New York. Emily was always pushing for that contemporary discourse,
KAHN: As they became more well known and better resourced, they were huge philanthropists. They were not interested in new cars or in really much of any spending. They weren't spendy people. They both left the museum legacy gifts in their wills, and they both have had numerous exhibits there, and are currently on track to develop the Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Brattleboro Museum and Art Center affiliate, which will hold some archives and other things. It's a long term. Project that has been in the works for a number of years since their death, and maybe whoever is listening to this in the future years, it will already be an entity, you know, they were very simple in a lot of ways, and Vermont spoke to that simplicity.
MUSIC Section Three: (20:10) Mason’s Early Life, Education and Family Life
KAHN: So my mother was born in 1932 in New York City.
MASON: I was born on Horatio Street at a time when the West Side still had railroad tracks, and trains would come through on a daily basis. They would be preceded by a young man on a donkey with a lantern to clear the crossings,
KAHN: She was born to Alice Trumbull Mason, who was an abstract painter, and Warwood Mason, who was a seafaring sea captain for the American export lines.
MASON: His influence on me was to open doors to the world at large. Early on, I knew there were many cultures and countries that lay beyond our shores.
KAHN: Alice Trumbull Mason is a direct descendant of John Trumbull, who is one of the early portraitists of the presidents and has a historical place in early American painting history.
MASON: It was through my mother that I learned about the art world. She was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists in 1937 She had the resiliency of a pioneer and often expressed that belief. She wanted to be modern.
KAHN: My mom's mom was an alcoholic. She actually died of cirrhosis at a fairly young age. I think that impacted my mom very much. She also had a brother who died tragically in his 20s, and that I think impacted both my mom and my grandmother deeply.
INTERVIEWER: Your dad, was he supportive?
MASON: He was very supportive, but he was away a lot because he was a sea captain, which in my mother's infinite, but I don't think quite so infinite wisdom, thought she could bring up two children, be married, have a painting career, and do it all herself. I'm sure it was hard when the reality set in. My mother drank, I know she drank a lot, so I was horrified, yeah, and embarrassed and miserable. Sure, my mother became.. he had an addiction, a heroin addiction, and she didn't know to whom to turn, so these are all undercurrents in my, my teenage life,
KAHN: That lineage is, you know, part and parcel of the story of who my mom is, that she came from, was a product of this New York City art family that was, you know, living on on the fringes.
MUSIC
ROSE: Emily had a true art school upbringing. She went to what was called the High School of Art and Design. Maybe it was an active rebellion, but she decided she wanted to go to Bennington College and study up in Vermont rather than stay in New York, eventually she decided that Bennington College didn't have the rigor that she wanted, so she returned to New York and studied at the Cooper Union.
MASON: I was at Bennington, and I was sort of a snotty New Yorker who came up, and the teachers there were all doing work that had been done in New York five years before, so I said, well, why am I up here when I should be in New York? And they all, the faculty had all gone to Cooper, so there must be something there. And Cooper Union was wonderful those days in the days of the El (elevated train) and the El would go by and make so much noise you couldn't think. It was, it was really quite amazing.
ROSE: I think the best way to describe Emily is her rebellion from conventions, she was always cutting her own path. Emily wanted to do more than just pay lip service to this idea of craft and art making, and made a conscious decision to go to a little space called the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts up in Maine, and up there she learned from a weaver, Jack Lenore Larson. Larson was already a famous weaver at the time, and showed Emily a lot about color. She watched Jack dye his skeins of wool and hang him out to dry, and this became a very formative experience.
MASON: In the late 50s, I received the Fulbright scholarship to study in Venice, Italy. In Venice, during the first two months of my residency, I learned what it means to be completely alone, an awareness that would be difficult to experience today with cell phones and the internet always on hand. It was the solitude in. A place I had never been, where I began to work out my ideas.
ROSE: Emily first went to Venice on Fulbright, and then during her time, a few months after she arrived, this young strapping man, Wolf Kahn, came and joined her, and they were married there.
EMILY: We were married at the Municipio near the Rialto Bridge, somebody had promised us that we would be married by the mayor, and we got to the Municipio, the municipal building, and turned out the elevator operator (laughter) was going to marry us, so he put on his tricolore, and he married us, which I thought, “Well, very Italian – very Venetian.”
KAHN: My parents met in New York, but got married in Venice, and were married for almost 60 years, and it was till death do them part, that's what got them apart. I don't think it was an easy marriage, but it was a marriage filled with what I would call a very deep and abiding respect for each other.
MASON: When we came back from Italy in '60, we had no money. It was like when Wolf and I got married, it was like a vow of poverty, but who cared? Just after I gave birth to Cecily, the whole 10th Street manifested itself, and that was wonderful. I joined a gallery called Area Gallery, which was wonderful. It was a tiny gallery, the size was 20 by 20 or something. We had a little tiny wood stove, and it was.. it was wonderful. It was a co-op. We had to do a lot of things, like run out and get wood for the stove, or we'd have to go see who we wanted to have the next show. I remember going to paint the gallery once and I had Cecily in a little straw basket, you know, and I was painting away…. I had three shows there, 60 - 61, 62 - 63…something like that. Those are very important to me.
KAHN: One of my earliest memories is standing up in, in my crib, and looking up at the skylight. It was a very dirty, rustic old loft, really not fit for habitation, but we lived there, the four of us. It was a mix of soup on the stove, turpentine on the paint carts – and just by the barrel, like there was turpentine everywhere. And in fact, when my mom got COPD, I thought that turpentine, you know, infusion over decades is probably not really a great idea for your lungs.
ROSE: She was hot out of school, she got out of college, she went, got her Fulbright in Venice, she came back. She was part of the co-op scene on 10th Street. She received great reviews for the works that she produced there. Then she had children, and her life took a back seat to having, making sure that she was available to them.
MASON: I always felt it was very important to be at home at 3 o'clock when my kids came home from school, because they tell you things, then they don't tell you later on in the day, and I always felt this was important to keep channels and communication open, and you know, just to be there for them.
ROSE: She got a new studio in 1979 and that was a huge moment for her. So, in the 80s, we start to see her showing a lot more often. She was showing it with a variety of galleries around New York and outside of New York. Then the 90s it really started to take off. So there was a nice trajectory to her career that most artists would be very happy with.
Emily taught at Hunter College for 30 years. She started out teaching night classes, and that evolved to teaching Painting 101 essentially for all the way until 2012. If you can get a student when they're early in learning, you can maybe access that naivete in a way that's very productive.
MASON: (28:55) I believe that teaching is really being twice taught, a reciprocal relationship. I wanted to find an approach to help students to get away from how-to systems that they think they wanted and connect with something deeper within themselves.
ROSE: Emily was always a proponent of giving somebody that extra lift they need to make their art. Unbeknownst to a lot of her students, she would send them to Vermont Studio Center on a full scholarship. Sometimes they would know Emily was sending, sometimes they wouldn't. They would just receive word from Vermont Studio Center that they've received a scholarship to go and study for a semester or for a month.
MUSIC Section Four (29:00) Mason’s Dedication to Her Mother’s Legacy
ROSE: It was very important for Emily that her mother's legacy be respected and represented before she could go out and feel comfortable seeking her own career. Her mother had a retrospective at the Whitney in 1974 and that liberated Emily to go and pursue her own craft with a new vigor.
KAHN: Alice's work during her lifetime was not as recognized as her contemporaries like Gorky, Kandinsky, Mondrian. The list goes on of all the men around her whose work was similar to hers emerging during that time, and in some cases maybe not even as good as hers, and they, of course, went on to have storied careers, and she did not.
MASON: There was a certain resistance to women painters, and I was, I was aware of that. She used to say, “I'll be famous after I'm dead. I've always thought it a terrible thing to say, but I know what she means. She was ahead of her times, she wasn't recognized…
KAHN: My mother took it upon herself to continue to make sure that my grandmother's work was recognized and shown and celebrated. She went so far as to help publish a beautiful monograph of Alice's work that came out in 2019 just before my mom died, that my mom wrote the forward for, and her writing in it is exquisite and heartfelt, and very much in her voice. It was the last thing she did, actually, before she died.
ROSE: She saw the final proof of “Alice Trumbull Mason, Pioneer of American Abstraction” right before it went to press in 2019. Emily's work on the monograph was definitely a road map for how we wanted to work on Emily's legacy.
MUSIC ‘Mother in the Graveyard’ – Section Five (31:40) Mason’s End of Life and Legacy
KAHN: When my mom died, she died at the farm on Stark Road. She died on Emily Dickinson's birthday, December 10. It just made perfect sense.
So just before she died, Steven came up. It was early December, and my mom hated talking about death, just hated it, refused to discuss dying, and that always surprised me somewhat, because she was such a thoughtful and deep thinking person, and I had no idea what she wanted to do in terms of internment. So we sat with her one day at the table at the farm, looking out, and the snow was swirling outside. She never stayed up there for a winter, so she was quite fixated on the snowflakes.
And I said to her, “Mom, do you want to stay at the farm?”
And she said, “What do you mean?”
And I said, 'Do you want to be buried here?”
And she said, “Where?”
And I said, “Up in the field, where the meadow mushrooms are.”
And she said, “Oh, that would be lovely, looking out over Mount Monadnock.”
And every year the meadow mushrooms would come up in that spot, and she would traipse out to the field and pick them.
And now when the mushrooms come out in that spot in summer, I feel like it's a visit from her.
MUSIC
KAHN: We used a granite post, and we had engraved on it, on one side “Emily Mason, Abstract Painter,” and on the other side “Hope is a Thing with Feathers”, Emily Dickinson's poem.
MUSIC
(Kahn reading poem)
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
KAHN: I feel like that poem encapsulates my mother so well. She was a very generous spirit with a hugely hospitable soul. And you know, that generosity, I think you can see it in her work. I felt it in her ability to be a parent, a mother, a friend….Just a really good soul.
MUSIC
ROSE: What's happening with Emily Mason right now is people are taking time to really drink in what each of these paintings represent. I see Emily being shown in larger circles. We're just hoping that more and more folks see her. I also hope that she's an example to other artists who are trying to figure out, you know, their own path in making art.
MASON: 36:03 (applause) Here I am. (applause) That's it.
MUSIC CONTINUES AND FADE.
PODCAST HOST WEINMANN: This episode of the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast was written and produced by me, Lissa Weinmann. Commentators were Steven Rose and Melany Kahn. Archival footage of the voice of Emily Mason was provided by the Emily Mason and Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation, details of which can be found on the podcast page. Podcast editors are Matt Hall and Alec Pombriant. Sound design is by Dave Snyder, and mastering was done by Guilford Sound. Music is from Marlboro, Vermont, based Red Heart the Ticker, that's Ty Gibbons and Robin MacArthur, from their album “Tigers of the New England Forest”. Vermont folk musician Margaret MacArthur's “Mother in the Graveyard” was performed with permission by Anna and Elizabeth. Brattleboro Words Trail theme music is by Ty Gibbons. Special thanks to Brattleboro Community Television for all their help. Thanks for listening, and we look forward to seeing you again soon on the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
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