Robin Mason

I spent time in conversation with my grandfather, Arthur F. Mason (1896–1957), not through speech, but through the slow, searching labour of painting.

 

In December 1926, he returned from a year in Konstantinovka, Donetsk, then part of the USSR, now in the battle zone of Ukraine, where he had overseen the installation of Belgian machinery in the first mechanised glassworks constructed after the Revolution:The October Revolution Glass Works.

 

It was a year marked by difficulty and dislocation. A language he struggled to grasp. A working day that began before dawn and bled into night, seven days a week. And all the while, his wife and newborn son had moved back to Bryn Myrddin, waiting for a man gaining and sharing experience, yet carrying a constant longing for home.

 

At the completion of the main building works, a red commemorative flag was produced, a ceremonial banner marking the achievement of the new Soviet factory. That flag still exists in the family archive, folded beside photographs of the event: Arthur standing among workers, engineers, and the future they were tasked with building. In this painting, the flag appears again, not as political symbol, but as a fragment of lived history, a piece of cloth that travelled home with him, carrying the residue of that cold, formative year.

 

This work imagines his return to Wales, not as a portrait, but as a presence within the forest of memory:

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a coat standing without a body,

a stump anchoring the moment of arrival,

a small suitcase beside the red flag that survived both time and intention.

 

That journey altered the course of his life.

 

He left the itinerant industrial work that had taken him across Belgium, Holland, and France. He chose instead to root himself with his family in Wales, eventually becoming Head Crane Inspector in Cardiff and Port Talbot steel works.

 

This painting is an act of listening to the archive, to objects, documents, and the quiet residues of experience,  in an attempt to meet a grandfather I never knew, and to honour the distances, discoveries, and decisions that shaped the path that followed.