(828) 526-0173 | [email protected] | Copyright 2024 – All Rights Reserved.
A Life of Passion
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2019/04 - April
Mase (rhymes with Grace) Lucas is one of those lucky people who discovered her passion early on.
She says, “I came upon a way to live the life I was meant to live.”
Even though it was sometimes difficult in the 70s and 80s, she bypassed all the curses about having to have a college diploma to be successful, about art being an iffy vocational choice, about women being limited in almost any profession. She loved the visual and language arts and immersed herself in them.
From earliest memory she was in love with the majesty, form, line, mass, texture, and soul of the equine, so she began painting horses. People adored her images and bought them like crazy as she traveled the art show circuit. Studio work was a perfect match for her talent and routine. The rest is history, a very successful one at that, and she never looked back.
“Painting just suited everything about me,” Mase says. “I enjoyed a nomad’s lifestyle. I loved living out of the back of a van. Along the way, I made hundreds of friends amongst a subculture that felt like family.”
As to Mase’s process, she says, “I started painting oil on canvas. I became sensitized to the solvents and switched to acrylic, which lent itself to new and interesting techniques. While horse paintings have most clearly defined my career, I also love abstract. It seems as an artist matures, they strip away ‘representational’ and begin to appreciate ‘abstract.’ I sometimes paint just color fields.”
She’s taken her abstracts one leap further, to small metallic paintings that
are wearables.
“It’s very zen-like,” she says. “I am obsessed with these small abstracts that are art-cessories.”
Wearing them is like being a walking miniature art exhibition.
Mase has lived a life of passion that has brought her great spiritual and emotional wealth in addition to a comfortable living. It’s allowed her the privilege of building a barn and bringing real horses into her life, horses that she owns and others she boards. There’s a never-ending stable of divine possibilities right in her own backyard.
