Roy M Mason Na Aws His Working Sketches And Watercolors

Working With Roy M Mason's Sketches and Watercolors

Roy M Mason is a mid-tier American artist whose watercolor and sketch work has been circulating on auction sites and estate sales for a few years. His stuff isn't going to make your collection, but it's honest, competent, and cheap. That's usually the point of hunting through this kind of material. The phrase you're seeing online is a keyword-stuffed listing title, not a formal catalog name. It appears on eBay and some smaller auction sites where sellers don't know how to title listings properly. If you're searching for his work, use just "Roy M Mason watercolor" or "Roy M Mason sketch" and you'll find more relevant results. I picked up a small Mason watercolor about two years ago from a estate sale in Ohio. It was a fairly standard landscape, signed and dated, priced at $15. The paper was cheap machine-made from the 1970s, which explains why the colors look flat compared to genuine watercolor work from earlier periods. Mason was painting during a time when many artists switched to cheaper materials to pump out inventory faster. That doesn't make the work worthless, but it changes how you should handle and store it.

Here's what actually matters when you're looking at his output: check the paper first. Mason used a range of papers over his career. The ones from the late 60s and early 70s tend to be on acidic, inexpensive paper that's already yellowing. Anything on heavier, cotton-based paper is worth more attention. The signature is usually in pencil on the lower margin, sometimes with a date. Not always consistent, which tells you he wasn't treating each piece as a finished gallery work. If you're trying to authenticate or date a piece, look at the back. Many of his sketches have pencil notations or exhibition labels from local galleries. I found one with a tag from a Dayton art show that gave me the exact year. Without that, you're guessing based on style alone, and his style didn't change enough between decades to be useful for dating. The watercolors themselves are straightforward wet-on-wet landscapes, some figure studies, and occasional city scenes. Nothing experimental. He works in the American Impressionist tradition without pushing it anywhere interesting. That's fine if you want affordable wall art. It's a problem if you're looking for innovation.

When framing these, use acid-free mats and UV-protective glass. The papers are fragile and the pigments fade faster than you'd expect on this quality of board. I've seen pieces displayed for ten years under bad lighting look significantly worse than the same work stored flat in a drawer. Don't hang them in direct sunlight. That goes for any watercolor, but Mason's are on particularly weak paper so the damage shows sooner. Buying these things is easy online. Search for his name on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and local estate sale apps. Prices run between $10 and $80 typically. I've seen originals listed for $200 and up on some sites, and that's overpriced unless there's something genuinely rare about the piece. Mason isn't collected enough to command that kind of money anywhere right now. If you want to dig deeper into his work, check the Dayton Art Institute archives. They have some materials. There's also a small body of his work at the Ohio Historical Society. Neither is a major collection, but it's enough to establish a timeline and see the progression, however slight, across his career.

One thing most people miss: Mason did a lot of quick plein air sketches on location, then turned some of them into larger studio watercolors later. The sketches are usually smaller, on thinner paper, and more energetic. If you're choosing between a loose sketch and a polished studio piece by him, the sketch is often the more interesting work. It's also harder to find because people tend to frame the finished version and sell the sketch for scrap. I'd recommend looking into his work if you like affordable American watercolors from the mid-century and don't mind mediocre quality. If you want something with real staying power, save your money for better artists. Mason's output is respectable by hobbyist standards but it won't appreciate or outlast most better-preserved work from the same period.