June 16 - November 15, 2020
Brian St. John
Brian St. John is an artist residing in San Antonio, Texas. He has maintained a studio for all of his adult life and his practice is primarily painting and mixed media on paper. Brian is a professor of art at St. Mary’s University where he teaches courses in Drawing, Painting, and Special Topics in Art, he also serves as Department Chair, and the Director of the Louis J. Blume Library Gallery. Brian is married to Sara Toudouze and they reside with a single cat, Paloma.
Artist Statement:
For my exhibit at the Radius Center in San Antonio Texas I will include works from four bodies of work that I have been developing over the past four and a half years. Each is made up of individual pieces that are part of a collective having a shared experience in making and concept. The collectives are linked by varying degrees of preparation and execution as well as formal concerns in design. I will often employ some form of geometry/pattern married with natural forms. Such as in the example that I am sending with this document: “Implicit Order”, ink, charcoal, and pastel on paper mounted on board 36” x 48”.
Here is recent email dialog with a colleague referring to another group of works involving a chrysalis
BSJ: “I have been working on a new group of images of abstractions of a chrysalis. An image of a chrysalis is a powerful symbol of alchemy, one of perpetual transformation caught in the moment of becoming.”
SN: “Thanks for sharing your works on the chrysalis. So, here comes another goofy question. In a couple of the images, you have some circles and triangles in the images that appear over the top of the chrysalis, at least as I see it. What do the shapes represent?”
BSJ: “The geometry used in the images speaks to a type of ordered structure that is not always visible in the natural world. I would hope that the connected nature of the structure evokes an interplay, movement, and perhaps a mystery and is linkage or a bridge to an underlying structure present in all things visible to the eye.”
There will be approximately fifty works in this exhibit.
106 Auditorium Circle
San Antonio, 78204 TX
210.896.1985
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