William Brouillard • Ohio (B:1947)
Balance of Nature 2004 • Stoneware on a Wooden Base 28 1/2” x 11 1/2” x 17”
The small, 1960’s era high school Shop Class was filled with teenage boys holding their drawings in the air. Before they got to hammer and saw, teacher Burl Banks wanted them to first draw their designs. Then he chose the drawings he found interesting, imaginative, and beautiful.
William Brouillard can’t remember if his drawing was chosen, but he remembered the lesson: Imagination counts. When you live in a one stoplight town in rural Wisconsin, where the nearest big city (Minneapolis) isn’t even in your state, art appreciation isn’t taught in art class, but rather by unconventional Shop teachers.
Brouillard has spent a lifetime as a potter and craftsman making utilitarian things that are often museum-quality art. We suppose the words “Make” and “Art” have been his guiding lights since he was formed into a professional potter at Alfred University; a resident craftsman in North Carolina; a ceramics professor at The Cleveland Institute of Art; and a Cleveland studio potter and artist.
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One thing has been constant in his life and work - Brouillard is a “maker”. His eclectic Tremont studio is filled with dishes, tables, and vessels in a virtual stream-of-consciousness parade of artistic styles and trials. “I have bodies of work that keep coming back like seasons. I don’t get bored, but rather not interested anymore, so I do something else for awhile.”
Brouillard’s best known style is a kind of Steampunk funk, filled with anachronistic machine age imagery. He’s fascinated by the forms and materials of industrial plants. Places where things were made. His imagination has a futuristic tilt, and he easily cites astrophysicist Arthur Eddington’s famous quote: “not only will the future be stranger than you imagined. The future will be stranger than you can imagine.”
Balance of Nature combines Brouillard’s fascination with two opposites in the world; old factories and nature. He has long been fascinated by odd shapes found in aging industrial plants where things are made. He sees the same type of easily overlooked beauty in natural sea forms. Brouillard’s respect for places where things were made shows through his choice of textbooks. CIA students read Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. Their teacher’s heart belongs to people who make things, but mostly to those who bring a special beauty to the things they make.
Canton Museum of Art Permanent Collection • Gift of Richard and Renee Zellner, 2016.84
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1.
“He self-diagnosed himself with Attention Deficit Disorder. I think it was an attempt to explain the fact he just loves to always be making things.”
2.
“Blessed with a wry sense of humor, much of his work includes the humorous world view associated with the Funk Art movement the emerged on the west coast in the second half of the 20th Century.”
3.
“After serving in the U.S. Army he found himself studying clay at Alfred University in upstate New York. As he tells it, choosing between a military life and one as a potter was an easy decision.”
4.
“Well into his 60s, he still takes lots of risks as an artist. He seems to have little desire to stay in one place.”
Brouillard Timeline. Scroll over images to see timeline.
