Sara Brennan

October Featured Artist Sara Brennan

For nearly twenty years, Artist Sara Brennan has been a Sunday volunteer at LSPS-LC. She’s used her time there to regroup and relax from a rewarding but time-consuming career.

Brennan (born 1954, Fort Wayne, Indiana), has a long thread of artists in her family history. Both grandmothers were opera singers and her mother was a concert pianist. As a child, Brennan could burn through a coloring book faster than any of her piers. Her love of colored pencils and neatly rendered drawings kept her glued to the pages for hours. She credits this intense attraction to hues with the exploration of glaze combinations later in life.

Brennan gained experience and degrees in graphic design and business advertising at Northwood University in Michigan and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. She completed her bachelors at Loyola University Chicago in communications and development after the company she worked for encouraged her to pursue it. Her degrees lead to a 27-year career at S&C Electric Company (located in Chicago). Initially hired as a secretary, Brennan was one of the few women (or people for that matter) to have experience in graphics on a PC. The management noticed, and she was able to make her way into the marketing department.

Over the next three decades, Brennan worked towards being a senior marketing support specialist. The job was full of logistical puzzles, as well as a lot of communication with creative types. She would spend up to a whole year planning S&C’s booth for trade fairs. She would coordinate with the CEO, designers, sales groups and construction workers. Sometimes the larger booths would feature 20 thousand pounds of equipment and it was Brennan’s job to make sure it all came together. The artist found a kind of creativity in this massive undertaking. Her ability to chat with all types of experts gave her an inside view of their work. The information and collaboration she was able to entice out of them was what made her so good at her job. The way that the graphic designers talked passionately about their own work made her want to partake in a creative practice for herself.

Brennan joined the Jane Addams Hull House Association’s ceramics program because it was so close to her home in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. She found that it took a bit of courage to commit to this new creative outlet, but once she got started she felt right at home. Brennan gravitated towards vessel forms most of all; vases, bowls and cups. Unfortunately, in an ironic twist, pottery wheels gave her vertigo! The artist quickly switched to hand building, using the pinch pot method to create beautiful pieces. She even started teaching a hand-building class, but the whole location shut down and went dormant for a year. Fellow ceramicist Meg Biddle invited her join her place called Lincoln Square Pottery Studio - Learning Center. Along with Brennan and a few more dedicated volunteers, the new studio kicked off in 2003 and she’s been there ever since.

Although Brennan’s career was very demanding, she found a nice quiet and relaxing space at LSPS-LC. Every Sunday she would come in and manage the studio’s open hours along with fellow volunteer Ann Cibulskis. Her duties included helping students with anything studio related, answering phones and questions from walk-ins. She enjoyed talking up the studio to anyone that inquired- giving impromptu tours and pointing out all the wonderful options the artist had to create their work. She did dabble in creating her own pieces, but generally her volunteer day was a relaxing end to her long week.

Brennan retired from her job at S&C Electric in 2019, with an eye toward more time in the studio. Unfortunately the pandemic closed the creative space down for a number of months in 2020, and she had to put her plans on hold. A switch in schedules lead Brennan to volunteer on Friday days, quite a different experience from her calm Sundays. The daytime shift at the studio is reserved for independent study students, who tend to be more boisterous and like to connect with each other. Being used to everyone minding their own business on the weekends, Brennan suddenly had a lot of people talking to her. She managed to roll with the punches and started chatting and exchanging life experiences. At the same time, Brennan was finally able to sit and create some of the work she’s been thinking about. The artist’s style is both highly controlled but also has a fun fluidity to it. Her greatest ability when it comes to clay is her level of patience. She’ll create a pinch vessel and put it back on her shelf with a bit of plastic on it until it’s dried perfectly through (most artists will rush it to the bisque shelf). The edges on her work are also admirable; thin yet strong. Her glaze technique is easily identifiable. She favors a spontaneous look created by layers of glazes finely controlled in their pouring. She’s been experimenting with multiple glazes on the inside of her pieces, which stay perfectly contained. Meg Biddle would normally balk at such runny surface glazes and their ability to harden onto her kiln shelves. Brennan however creates lovely “feet” on her pieces and cleans the bottoms off incredibly well.

The one small positive part of being isolated during the pandemic was the ability for Brennan to delve into ceramic tutorials on YouTube. She jumped down the glazing rabbit hole and didn’t look back. Brennan even got into a bit of the chemical make up and reactions of glazes during firing, and she was excited to take her new knowledge back to the studio. She’s been trying new combinations and ideas the past few months, and has been found staring at the wall of glaze tiles for long periods of time. Brennan has begun to hit her stride, rotating between pieces in production, and glazing. One of her retirement wishes is to be at the studio three days a week, so she can build a piece, fitness a drying one and daydream over surface colors. Unfortunately for this artist, she’ll need to take her plans to a new studio because she’s leaving LSPS-LC this month! Brennan is moving back to be with family in Fort Wayne, and will also be carefully moving her collection of ceramics made at the studio over the years. Her brother is part of the arts community in Indiana, so she hopes to be able to settle into a new studio space and build on her ideas and friendships there.

We’ll miss Sara because she’s been a calm and kind presence at LSPS-LC for nearly two decades. Her wonderful taste of music has kept other artists on their toes, and her willingness to help others will be missed as well. Biddle will miss her input on organizational solutions and dedication to the space. Brennan also organized and cleaned up parts of the studio that others would just overlook. We’re sure that within a month we’ll ask ourselves why things don’t seem as they should be. As an homage to her, we’ll work on keeping our sponges clean and organized in their bins, and be thankful for all the time she spent with us.