Pat Marsello Works

Pat Marsello

Pat Marsello lives and works in the North Valley of Albuquerque New Mexico.  She has been a professional potter and brushwork painter since 1993.  She works primarily with stoneware and porcelain, but also combines other materials, such as wood, metal and paper into her pieces.  Her training began in 1978 with a series of workshops on Chinese Brushwork in New Hampshire, and continued with two other teachers over a period of ten years. She also studied in China under the master painter, Ning Yeh.  Her ceramics training was with Lou D’Amico in Albuquerque, starting in 1990.  Today, Pat teaches brushwork and clay to a number of students every spring and has done workshops at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, Ghost Ranch, and the Maxwell Museum.  She has participated in national wholesale and retail shows over the years, including the New Mexico Arts and Crafts Fair, Scottsdale Arts Festival, the Baltimore ACC show and Weems Artfest.  She shows her work in a variety of galleries all over the United States, and has won several awards, including first place at the Santa Fe Challenge Fair, Grand Prize at the New Mexico Arts and Crafts Fair, and an article featuring her work in Ceramics Monthly. 


Artist Statement  

The art of brushwork is comprised of three elements. The brush is a magician’s wand, and if handled correctly, will create a world out of thin air. The paint is the blood; it holds the possibility of Ch’I yun, the living spirit of a painting. And the paper is the skin, the texture that accepts the paint and absorbs the energy of the brush. It is the dance between these three, the brush, the paint and the paper, guided by the hand that turns a blank space into a painting; one with life and movement and potential.

It is these ideas that guide my hand, but nature is what guides my heart. My subjects are elemental, sky, rock, water, plants and creatures. And in my approach to them, I try to reduce my subject down to its simplest form, using mindful strokes, efficient, but never lacking, deliberate, yet also spontaneous. For in that simplicity is the beauty of its essence.

As a potter, I hand-build and wheel-throw clay, using the same reductive process. Always working within the idea that less is more, that simplicity is powerful. It is this quality that I try to convey in every piece I make.