Roy Mason is essentially a landscape painter whose style and direction has a kinship with the English watercolorists of the early nineteenth century, especially the beautifully patterned art of John Sell Cotman. And like this English master, Mason realizes his subjects in large, simplified masses which, though they seem effortless, are in reality the result of skilled design born of hard work and a thorough distillation of the natural form that inspired them.

As a boy Roy Mason began the long process of extracting the goodness of the out-of-doors, its tang of weather, its change of seasons, its variable moods. His father, a professional engraver and an amateur landscape painter, took his sons on numerous hunting expeditions, and imparted to them his knowledge and love of nature. Out of this background of hunting and fishing, it was only natural that Roy first painted subjects he knew best: hunters in the field, fishermen in the stream, ducks and geese on the wing -- almost always against a vast backdrop of weather landscape. It is this subject matter that has brought Mason a large and enthusiastic following among sportsmen, but it is his exceptional performance with this motif that commends him to artists and discerning collectors.

Mason had to earn the privilege of devoting himself exclusively to painting. Like many others, he had to work hard, long hours in a struggling family business which, though it was allied to art of a kind -- the design and production of engraved seals -- bore no relation to the painting of pictures. But it did teach Roy the basic techniques of commercial art, and later, for twelve years, he and his sister Nina conducted an advertising art studio in Philadelphia. On the death of their father, they returned to their home in Batavia, New York. After more years of concentrated effort, Roy and his brother Max finally established a thriving family business at the old stand.