Terry Brett has recently been creating large monochrome paintings using organic materials and deep relief, sometimes carving into a thick plaster surface or building layers of heavily textured burlap fabric. The composition is often a grid-like pattern, relying on a variety of materials to create dramatic light and shadow in an earthy color palette. These new works will be featured in the upcoming exhibition at Leslie Curran Gallery.

Terry’s passion for trying new materials and techniques drives the evolution of his work. His recent experimentations with gilded and gold leaf paintings were featured in a 2019 exhibition at the Morean Arts Center. The artist’s last exhibition with Leslie Curran in 2016 showed influence by Franz Kline, Willem deKooning, and Mark Rothko. These large black and white compositions with a remarkable immediacy and power felt simultaneously ultra modern and timeless.

A native of St. Petersburg and graduate of Eckerd College, Brett comes from a family of artists. His grandmother Ruth Willbrand, was an award winning artist of distinction, painting figurative and abstract art during the mid-century period. Her daughter and Terry’s mother, Gail Willbrand Brett, was an accomplished portrait painter. 

Terry Brett is an important part of the fabric of this city. He has spent many years as a civic leader and served as a trustee of St. Petersburg College and chairman of the board of the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce, the Morean Arts Center/Chihuly Collection, and Leadership St. Pete.

Brett has exhibited extensively in the Tampa Bay Area including Duncan McClellan Studio and The Mahaffey Theatre. His work is in numerous corporate and private collections.

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Jan Richardson began creating ceramics in 1960, but her love of craft goes back to a young childhood surrounded by creative women. From her roots in fine craft to her current extraterrestrial-inspired abstract wall pieces, Jan’s art spans genres and generations. Her curiosity and career in clay have led her across the globe. From her childhood in Long Island to her first clay class in Santa Barbara and to this day, Jan’s need to create sustains her.

Her first business was making and selling hand-crafted clothing. After settling in Knoxville, Maryland, Jan was the proprietor, head artist, and designer for Windy Meadows for thirty years. She and her crew of local artists recreated their rural Maryland architecture in handmade ceramic miniature to critical acclaim. From Maryland, Jan moved to St. Petersburg, where she closed the Windy Meadows line and returned to independent creating.

Not content to remain a solely practicing artist, Jan has also been a teacher, member, and promoter of her local ceramics communities throughout her sixty year career. Jan is currently teaching at the Morean Center for Clay in St. Petersburg, Florida and at the Safety Harbor Art and Music Center in Safety Harbor, Florida.

In her current body of work, her early love of indigenous art and geometric pattern have culminated in a collection of vessels designed to honor and echo that ethos. She asks us to look at the commonalities of pattern and design between ancient cultures and to consider what it was that they were communicating. Jan’s newest works are no longer simply functional objects, but vessels to carry the imagination to the farthest reaches of the universe.