Barbara Mason is an artist/printmaker who lives in Aloha, Oregon. She was introduced to printmaking in 1985 and has been fine tuning her skills in the media ever since. An active volunteer and arts advocate, Barbara has been a resource person for the Beaverton School District since 1976. She has served 6 years on the board of the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts at the Portland Art Museum, (as president in 1992, the year the center opened) and two years on the board of the Northwest Print council where she is currently an artist member. She is in the second year of a three year term on the board of Crow’s Shadow Institute, an art institute on the Umatilla Indian Reservation that is dedicated to the artistic and economic development of native American artists. In addition to a love of ink and paper, Barbara’s work shows a passion for archaeology. She has an extensive library on early man and says “Artists spend their whole lives defining their world with their work. My interest in the primal shapes of the prehistoric rock artists is often apparent in my artwork, we can’t know where we are going if we don’t know where we have been. I can feel the thread of my personal humanity winding back thousands of years and I realize how all peoples are connected regardless of space or time.” Travel is also a great influence, and scenes from vacations to Europe and other parts of the Americas are depicted as well. Barbara’s monotypes are each original works of art, no two are alike. The method is very direct: lithography ink is manipulated on a smooth plexiglas plate and then transferred to 100% damp rag paper with an etching press. Her works are in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, Intel Corporation, Crow’s Shadow Institute, and numerous private individuals. Barbara is the current director of Waterstone Gallery; an artist owned gallery in the Pearl Art District of Portland, Oregon.