Emily Passman/John Brickels

John Brickels

Ceramic artist John Brickels has been creating stoneware clay sculptures for over 50 years. His ceramic art ranges from architecturally themed sculptures to life size robots.

He has exhibited with the Smithsonian Institute, the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne Vermont and the Springfield Massachusetts Museum of Art, History and
Science.

The City of San Antonio commissioned Brickels to create sculptures to present to visiting dignitaries Pope John Paul II, Queen Elizabeth, King Juan Carlos, Placido Domingo and President George W. Bush.

His work has been featured in the Boston Globe newspaper and has garnered national attention with features in Ceramic Monthly magazine and Hemming’s
Classic Car magazine.

Brickels has no agenda. He has no “Ax to Grind”. He makes sculptures that he would want to see if he walked into a gallery or museum. He uses clay because
it is elemental and basic. He exploits the plastic qualities of clay by extruding, bending and manipulating it to its technical limits.

Dwellings: John Brickels and Emily Passman

John Brickels and Emily Passman

Exhibition Reception Date:

Thursday, November 3, 5:30pm

Exhibition Opening:

November 3, 2022

Exhibition End Date:

November 27, 2022

Exhibition Year:

2022

Emily Passman

There is a moment while I am painting that I can describe as the highest, or most fulfilled.  It is the moment when I am fully engaged in seeing my subject. The subject, my eye, my arm, my hand, the paintbrush and the canvas are aligned, synchronized in balance. My ego has flown away and I am left painting. It is fully “process versus product.”  From this place always comes a product with which I am pleased. Staying in that balanced state of seeing and painting is the goal.

What initially inspires me to paint is quite simple. It can be shapes created by some un-nameable collection of forms, either in a landscape, interior or still life. It is not the “pretty picture” in it’s entirety, but a pleasing composition I may find within it…where a shadow meets the light, interrupted by a mass of color, or the collective shape in a group of forms. My connection is to the process, and to being able to tell the viewer something they don’t already know about the subject. I am not interested in a pretty picture or an organized still life, but in finding passages and pleasing arrangements within. A shape against a shape, a dark against a light, or a color that strains to be captured and presented again through my brush. It is what I do with the subject that matters to me. A painting that is too explicit is a bore. If my paintings have a feeling of a sketchbook I feel successful.

I do a lot of “plein air” sketching, and teach the process to others. Sketching very often heightens my ability to see. My best work done is when I carry a large canvas and easel to the field, and use my largest brushes.