Jonathan Brilliant didn’t always want to be an artist.

Growing up he dreamed of owning the stage as a rock ‘n’ roll drummer, touring the world as part of a famous band.

However, Brilliant managed to make part of that dream come true.

He entered college at the age of 22 and gravitated toward visual arts. He said he began to show off finished pieces when he was 25.

“I didn’t even know it was an option and I never really worked as an artist growing up,” Brilliant said.

Since 2009 he has been all over the world, but instead of keeping the beat in the background, he takes center stage creating enormous installation art out of everyday materials found at a coffee shop.

On Sept. 7, Brilliant began his latest project called “Woven & Stacked,” which was erected at the Ellipse Gallery on the second floor of the Henry Madden Library. He said the gallery and library that houses it immediately impressed him.

“It’s beautiful,” Brilliant said. “When you come up in the morning, everything’s dark and there’s light flowing through the building and you get the sense that the building itself is a basket. This is a signature building for this campus.”

Brilliant said that even though he was handed floor plans and pictures, he had no idea that the library was built around the motif of basket weaving.

“They couldn’t have picked a better site for me to work in,” he said.

Before he began, he printed the floor plans for the gallery and drew on them, testing different designs, he said.

“If you were to go upstairs and look down on the piece, you can sort of see the sense of one complete drawing of how I wanted it,” he said.

During the reception Thursday night he brought the drawings to compare the early sketches to the final piece.

Nancy Youdelman, an art instructor at Fresno State, was the one who proposed that Brilliant come in as a resident artist to the Center for Creativity and the Arts.

Youdelman said that Brilliant’s work, which uses no glue or other adhesives to hold thousands of coffee stir sticks in place, would be perfect for the fall 2012 theme, “Consumption and Sustainability.”

She suggested that Brilliant should be set up with the Ellipse Gallery, fittingly near a Starbucks, where she believed the installation piece would receive more exposure.

“A lot of students wouldn’t normally go all the way over to the art gallery to look at art,” Youdelman said. “And I thought it would interest people who wouldn’t normally be interested.

“I think that was actually quite successful.”

Brilliant said the initial inspiration behind his art came from spending countless hours observing people at coffee shops.

“I was making a lot of drawings in coffee shops, looking at other people and the way they held the coffee cup,” he said. “It was initially the coffee cup sleeves, because that was the point of contact where the hand touches the cup.”

Brilliant began creating art using coffee cup sleeves. He drew inspiration from British sculpture artists such as Richard Long, Tony Cragg and Antony Gormley.

“They got all their materials from their natural environment,” Brilliant said. “So the coffee shop must be my natural environment.”

Brilliant’s first installation, “The Goldsworthy of the Coffee Shop” was erected at the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, S.C. in 2006.

Strangely enough, Brilliant is not the biggest coffee fan.

“I’m just as happy to drink tea in a coffee shop,” he said. “I’m still more interested in the coffee shop itself and what’s going on there.”

Brilliant said it’s the customer’s interaction with the organic nature of the cups that captured his attention.

“For most people, other than their computers, which are plastic and metal, and their cars which are plastic and metal, most people in their daily life don’t touch any other materials,” he said. “There’s something so special about the coffee cup and that’s their point of contact for wood. It fascinates me.”

Brilliant said he still enjoys taking out his drum set and playing a little, though he now prefers the sticks that go with coffee rather than percussion.

Although he may never catch the limelight of the rock ‘n’ roll stage, Brilliant said he found his own platform.

In 2009, he went on his “Have Sticks Will Travel” tour. Brilliant said he only planned to create a few installations, but as he traveled, he began to realize that his work wouldn’t end at the end of the tour.

“I’ve been happy to do it because I like that concept that there is no studio, no storage, I build everything where it’s exhibited, where it’s created, where it’s destroyed, all in the same place,” he said.

Brilliant said his next installation will be created in Birmingham, Ala., and he doesn’t plan to end it there.

Brilliant said, “There’s no reason to prematurely cut things off.”

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