A Journey of Discovery

A young artist turns to the past and finds deeper meaning in the present

- SARAH GIANELLI

Growing up, Mason Williams knew very little about his great-great-great grandfather Frederick Ballard Williams beyond the fact that he was a painter based in New York. When he was older and pursuing his own fine art education at Laguna College of Art and Design, he became more curious and began to dig a little deeper.

In his research, he found out that Ballard Williams had been connected to the Hudson. River School of painters and had traveled to the Grand Canyon in the 1870s where he painted alongside Thomas Moran.

At the time, Mason was working on his master's thesis which, coincidentally, was about the sublime in 19th-century landscape paintings of the American West and the artists whose work defined the aesthetic most famously Moran and other Hudson River School artists Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole. "There was this really cool, full circle feeling happening," says Mason, who was excited to learn that his ancestor had not only been a painter, but loosely associated with some of the most significant artists of that era.

Little did Mason know he had only scratched the surface. The true spine-tingling moment of synchronicity came this past April when Mason was at the historic Salmagundi Club in New York City for Americans in Paris, an annual exhibition presented by Laguna Beach gallery Vanessa Rothe Fine Art.

While in school, Mason would stop into the gallery frequently and, in 2022, Vanessa Rothe asked him to be part of the exhibition in which he would share wall space with big names in contemporary realism like Michael Carson, Quang Ho, Adrienne Stein, Vincent Xeus and Jeremy Lipking.