Brian T. Kershisnik is the youngest of a happy and widely traveled family of sons. His father’s work as a petroleum geologist took them to various continents across the globe where his mother unfailingly set up a home filled with music, great food and active conversation, furnished with treasures and artifacts from their travels and hosting frequent parties and exotic slide shows of their globetrotting family life. Brian grew up happily dividing his time between his dad’s overseas assignments and summers spent with cousins in Rock Springs, Wyoming, a friendly, curious kid and with no notion at all of what he wanted to be when he grew up. Though he drew often to entertain himself, it never occurred to him that people actually did that for a living. Finding himself unceremoniously graduated from high school after an emergency evacuation from Pakistan abruptly ended his senior year, he applied to the University of Utah where his brother was attending school. A General Architecture class from Peter Goss and a Ceramics class from Dorthy Bearnsen began to focus his interests. After serving as a missionary in Northern Europe he determined to study ceramics at Brigham Young University and then architecture at the University of Utah. During his first year in ceramics he met Joe and Lee Bennion and arranged to spend the summer working in Joe’s pottery. After some months it became apparent that Brian was no potter and Lee suggested he try something with her paint box. Painting changed everything. Gallery owner Dolores Chase noticed his exhibitions and offered to begin his professional career. While many of his contemporaries looked elsewhere to establish their art careers, Brian focused on his Utah home. Though he now shows elsewhere and his works are in collections around the world, his home base of local collectors remains his most satisfying audience and his openings at David Ericson Fine Art in Salt Lake City and Meyer Gallery in Park City have an air of reunion and camaraderie. His studio is an old dance hall in Kanosh, Utah, though he now lives in the town of Provo.
