Why does anyone paint? Is it to continue the oldest tradition, the one our ancestors began when they marked the walls of caves to prove they were here, to translate experience into form? Maybe we paint to bear witness to the strangeness of being alive, to record this brief embodiment inside a vast and unknowable reality. Do we paint to inspire, or to caution? To translate what cannot be said? Sometimes it feels like an act of devotion, other times like survival. Abstraction and realism both reach toward the same horizon. Both attempt to touch what we cannot name.

Perhaps every story we tell is a gesture toward the undefinable truth of existence. Flesh & Stone lives in that paradox. Flesh dissolves, like liquid. Stone endures. Even when broken, stone remembers its shape, fractured pieces that can be put back together, though after rupture, they are never quite the same.

For Assata Mason, the search for meaning takes place within that paradox, between what dissolves and what endures. In Flesh & Stone, she strips away the outer skin of the self and renders what remains in dialogue with the myth of Medusa. Her paintings unfold like a lucid dream or a mirror seen through fog. Through Greek mythology, she finds a language for the unspeakable, crossing into another world to return with truth.

Medusa’s story, in Mason’s hands, becomes less a cautionary tale than a map of transformation. Once a mortal priestess punished and exiled for her vulnerability, Medusa is reborn here as a symbol of reclamation. Mason paints her not as a monster but as a mirror, a reflection of rage turned inward, a figure who has learned to look directly at what once petrified her. Each painting becomes a conversation between earlier versions of the self: the one who desired, the one who raged, the one who survived. When I spoke with Mason about the work, she described Medusa as a kind of shield. “She’s the version of me that’s lived through pain,” she said, “and now she helps me navigate the world.”

Rendered in oil and acrylic on canvas, these intimate works seem to burn softly from within. Flesh turns to light, and color becomes memory. The surface flickers with pinks that recall innocence, umbers that hint at disillusion, and gold that survives like embers beneath the skin. Mason’s palette is vast, her hand confident yet tender. She draws from the grotesque beauty of Ivan Albright, the chromatic richness of Kehinde Wiley and Arcmanoro Niles, and the sensuous forms of Sasha Gordon, yet her touch remains singular. Parts of the canvas are left bare, as though the body were still recalling what it’s made of, some changing measure of spirit, shadow, and stone, mixed differently each time it remembers.

To look at these paintings is to experience something close to what Carl Jung described when he wrote of facing one’s own image long enough to let the unconscious speak. In Flesh & Stone, mythology becomes that mirror. Each figure is both mythic and deeply personal, a fragment of the artist’s psyche reflected back to her until it begins to heal. Through color and form, she reassembles the broken image, not to return to what once was, but to understand it, to forgive it, and to hold it differently.

In the end, Flesh & Stone is not only about Medusa. It is about the human impulse to transform pain into pattern, to find meaning in the fragments. It reminds us that art, like myth, is a way of remembering who we have been, and who we still have the power to become.