Cal Football: Brett Johnson - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young D-Lineman

Bears' sophomore nose guard enjoy sitting at the pottery wheel in his spare time

Brett Johnson stands 6-foot-5 and weighs 285 pounds, which allows him to play the overwhelmingly physical position of nose guard on the Cal football team. He was a heavyweight wrestler in high school.

But there is a gentle, creative side to Johnson, who for the past three years has developed his skills doing pottery.

Johnson got his first chance to sit at a potter’s wheel in a class during his junior year at Desert Vista High School in Phoenix.

“I loved it right away, but it was difficult at first,” Johnson says. “You think it looks easy because there’s a lot of people who make it look easy. But it’s not. It’s not very easy at all.”

Johnson says he has produced more than 100 pottery pieces, many of them large bowls or tall vases. He has sent a couple pieces to art shows.

Cal fans know Johnson primarily as a promising young football player. He earned third-team Freshman All-America and third-team All-Pac-12 honors last fall from Pro Football Focus, and Athlon Sports named him a 2020 preseason third-team All-Pac-12 selection.

Ask Johnson how he identifies, he says, “I consider myself as a capable human who can do anything. Artist, football . . . all of it.”

Recent months have been frustrating for Johnson, who was quarantined at home all spring in Arizona due to the pandemic. Because his high school was shuttered, he had no access to his old art class studio, where his teacher would allow him to use the equipment.

Becoming adept at the potter’s wheel was the first challenge Johnson faced.

“Learning the wheel, depending on the wheel you’re using, you’ve got to adjust to the different speeds, the different types of clay, the different tools you can use,” he says. “You’ve just got to learn how the clay behaves on the wheel.”

The video below is from Johnson's days in high school learning how to use the wheel:

Johnson has found that even when he does everything right, things don’t always work out the way he wants.

“When you make things on the wheel not all of them survive. It’s not just you throw it and look how pretty,” he says. “You’ve got to let it rest a little bit, then you’ve got to fire it, then you glaze it, then you fire it one more time. Then you get the finished product. 

"More often than not within that process, things will drop, things will break. But if you give it a little extra TLC, things usually survive.”

The final step is applying the colored glaze that will give the ceramic piece its finished look. Johnson admits he grapples with the confusing chemistry involved in the process.

“To this day, I’m still not used to that. It’ll be a color that looks blue but it will come out red once it’s done firing,” he says. “It’s wacky. There’s definitely a learning curve there.”

A couple examples of Johnson's pottery work: 

.

Photos courtesy of Brett Johnson

.

Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo

Click the "follow" button in the top right corner to join the conversation on Cal Sports Report on SI. Access and comment on featured stories and start your own conversations and post external links on our community page.