About Jeremiah Miller

J E R E M I A H M I L L E R
"Momentary Solitude in Nameless Places"
January 5 - 29, 2007
Mooney Center Exhibit Hall, The College of New Rochelle

“I respond naturally and personally to my familiar environment. The finished work is a synthesis of information that I gather from the subject and the intuitive choices that I make during the process of painting. Painting is more than a way to tell a story or depict a scene. Painting is about everything. Everything includes the pigment and brushwork and canvas as much as the subject”.

About Jeremiah Miller
A native North Carolinian, Jeremiah Miller is noted for his paintings of the Carolina and Virginia landscape. His work is distinguished for its sensual brushwork, vibrant color harmonies and visceral textures. His paintings of out-of-the-way places in the wild evoke a mood of silence and solitude and tend to dissolve into abstraction.

His works have been exhibited in more than 40 one-man shows and are represented in numerous corporate and private collections in the United States and 11 foreign countries. His collector’s include: the Deland Museum of Art, Deland, FL; the South Carolina State Collection, Columbia; the Danville Museum of Art and History, Danville, VA; the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC; George Washington University, Washington, DC; the University of South Carolina at Sumter; Prudential Life Insurance Company, Newark, NJ; and IBM, Research Triangle Park, NC, among many others.

Miller holds a BFA in Design from the Ringling School of Art & Design in Sarasota, Florida and a BFA & MFA in Painting from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Miller has served as Artist-in-Residence at Blue Ridge Community College, Flat Rock, NC; Wilkes Community College, Wilkesboro, NC; and the Kershaw Fine Art Center, Camden, SC.

He has conducted school residencies & community art projects throughout the Southeast.

In 2000 Miller was one of 57 artists selected to take part in the nationwide project “Artist & Communities/America Creates for the Millennium”. He directed the Tennessee Project.

Miller lives with his wife, Sarah Johnson, a violinist, in the home they built themselves in the woods of northwest North Carolina.

The following is taken from his book
Momentary Solitude in Nameless Places

....In 1980, I returned to my native North Carolina to take a position as artist-in-residence at a college in the mountains. During a summer break from that residency, I went on a camping trip, and as a change of pace, carried along my paints. At the time I considered this a temporary respite from the model, and I would return refreshed to paint the human figure. It turned out that this journey into the woods provided the solution to a problem in my approach to and philosophy of painting.

The solitude experienced when painting these first landscapes was magically liberating. The fact that no one else was there in the woods with me while I was painting was a surprising relief. It was a revelation to discover that the presence of the model had been inhibiting. What should have been obvious to me was revealed: Solitude was essential to the unselfconscious state so important for my creative process.

As I proceeded with these first landscape paintings, it became important that my works display little evidence of humans. People populated my memories and subconsciously influenced my painting, but people depicted would only taint the landscape and interfere, just as had the models in my studio, with this creative process.

The woods also revealed something unexpected. When painting the familiar landscape of my youth, the order of time and space was suspended in a flood of illusive memories. The landscape was my marmalade and tea, conjuring thoughts of forgotten friends, places and moments from the past. These were not just recollections of past experiences in the landscape, but included memories of my artistic education and evolution. I gazed into the woods and saw a thousand years of painting history, and was also reminded that the landscape, as it had when I was a boy drawing in the woods, provided the perfect retreat for an uninterrupted flow of feelings, ideas and reflections.

My experiences during that summer break in 1980 revealed how important the past was in the selection and treatment of my subjects. I needed to have a history with a place. I came to this knowledge in the hills that held the memories of my youth and that pattern has played out in the other places where I’ve lived and worked as an adult. Living in Florida for more than a decade, I was never moved, beyond doing a few sketches, to paint the landscape. Now, I frequently go there to just do that. Memories hide in her rivers and swamps.

The paintings I did that summer started a gradual change in my choice of subjects. In a short period of time my concentration shifted from the human figure to landscape, and I’ve continued that focus for over twenty years. I still occasionally paint pictures of my family and friends in our man-made surroundings, but the landscape offers me an opportunity to disappear into a sanctuary; a private place where thoughts, feelings and memories flow uninterrupted into a passionate swirl of paint.

Having come full circle, I again, after five decades, find myself on that log by the creek in the woods near my house. As a child, this was a place from which I could project my aspirations on a romantic flight to some other location, just beyond the horizon. It’s now a place to reflect on what’s right before my eyes.

I’ve reached the horizon.

(also from same book):
The Adventure of Process

When venturing into the wild, we’ve all experienced a moment of heightened awareness.We notice something special in our surroundings. It may be a sunset, a quirky pattern of light, or a tapestry of textures. We might sense a phobic closeness of the trees, detect a foreboding in the air, or hear a sound that conjures something faintly familiar.

Whether the ability to recognize this special moment is an instinct, a tuned combination of the senses, or what some philosophers call an “aesthetic emotion”, I believe everyone experiences these feelings. Most people will take note of the moment, reflect on it, move on, and maybe share it with friends over dinner. The painter, poet, and musician, however, feel compelled to express this insight.

I experience these feelings frequently, especially if I’m in a familiar area. I’ve learned to trust these special moments. These signals never reach the level of an epiphany. They are more like nature giving me a hint of inside information, a subtle nudge to investigate and see where things lead.

I respond to this prod by making marks and spreading color on a flat surface. Immediately, a new lexicon unfolds: Lines, shapes, colors, and textures are thrown into the sensory mix of sunlight, trees, rivers, and rocks. Add to this the memories and reflections triggered by the landscape and the emerging ideas and feelings about the evolving painting process, and I have the stuff of adventure.

This fluid adventure presents new insights and challenges at every step. My desire is to capture the spirit and energy of that acute moment of awareness of the landscape while exploring the ideas arising from the process.

Many of the decisions I make during this exploration evolve out of an early interest in abstract painting. I’m attracted to the inherent abstraction in a scene and like to play in those magical areas on the canvas where positive space can transform into negative space –- areas where illusion dissolves into abstraction and content emerges from technique. I enjoy the broad and expansive movement invited by large scale and the manipulation of “all-over” fields of paint. I like to paint large to create a window to the world and invite the viewer to move closer and be confronted by the paint and the deconstruction of the image. I celebrate the visceral and tactile qualities of paint, and I’m obsessed by the natural movement of hand and brush. I believe an enthusiastic use of materials should leave a distinctive recognizable signature. Painting is more than a way to tell a story or depict a scene. Painting is about everything. Everything includes the pigment and brushwork and canvas as much as the subject.

Even with this deep interest in the formal and expressive aspects of painting, my most intense feelings as an artist are rooted in my natural surroundings. While understanding and appreciating the aesthetics of abstraction, admiring its purity and working to include some of the tenets into my work, it is vital that I stay grounded in recognizable imagery. Walking this line between realism and abstraction is difficult, but for me it’s the natural thing to do.

When this process works, something new and self-revealing emerges. Something honest and natural reveals and defines that initial, compelling moment in the landscape. Many times, some new priority arises out of the process, adds to, and even takes precedent over the original impetus. In any event, I intuitively celebrate my surroundings and the painting process.

This journey is always an adventure. Its’ rewards are momentary solitude, and ever once in a while, a little grace.