"I'm sort of a painter's painter--not a cutting edge one. I can do what I want because there's nothing expected of my paintings except what I expect--and that's a kind of blessing."
The Jaffe-Friede Gallery in the Hopkins Center is currently showing the still-life and landscape paintings of Ruth Miller. She and her husband, Andrew Forge, are Dartmouth's fall term Artists-in-Residence.
At an informal interview a few days following her lecture and slide presentation in the Loew Auditorium, Miller, leaning closely over a table at Rosey's Caf, confessed her terrible stage fright.
"I feel like I'm on life support hooked up to all those wires," Miller said.
Preferring conversation to the lecture hall, Miller felt at ease over apple juice and tea and talked to me of those painters, from Cezanne to Gorky to the overlooked "workers in the field," who have influenced her most. She circled back to the focus of her lecture, explaining her transition from abstract to representational painting.
Miller's shift from ambitious abstract paintings to still-lifes began after a year and a half of living and working on New York's 10th Street in the 1950s. Though Abstract Expressionism would not ultimately become her painting style, she was incredibly energized by her environment.
"It was a whole worldintense and open. There was a feeling that art was being made new," Miller noted.
With neighbors like Philip Guston, Willem DeKooning and Esteban Vicente, Miller had plunged herself into the midst of a movement. "I was in the right place at the right time. I didn't want to be anywhere other than New York."
Importantly, Miller never stopped drawing from observation in the whole of her abstract painting career. These drawings led her to an understanding that looking at things--having physical proximity to her subject--was to be the driving force for her work in paint.
"You draw to inform your work--but it's also an ongoing process of finding out how you see--what kind of painter you are, what you are, what you love. It's about understanding that line you see--how it expresses volume as it turns," Miller said as she traced the curve of my shoulder in the air.
Starting a family at the end of the 1950s, Miller moved from the city to rural Pennsylvania. There she fell in love with the trees near her house. Her tree portraits, heroic in scale, revealed a need for her to be close to the subject--close enough to touch.
Her most recent work continues with this theme of closeness as she sets up still-lifes within reach of her canvas. The still-life for Miller "is a controlled world. It's meditative. There's tactile involvement--a closeness. This is a three way conversation between you, the painting and the setup."
In this realm of concrete things--pumpkins, trees, eggplants, a blue table--looking, memory and desire all play a part. "As you work, memory builds up and the thing you're painting is not what it first seemed. You always keep discovering."
In this spirit, Miller may work one still-life over and over again. Through this process she gets closer to understanding the essence of the thing she is painting. "Some things may give themselves up quickly and some take a long time to reveal their character."
Time, however, is not so kind with some of her very perishable subjects. "You have to work intensely if you have heads of cabbages--they change their character, become transient as they decay. Memory begins to play a very strong role."
Her combination of looking, memory and desire appears in her paintings as an understanding that leads to the very interior of things. The cabbage is luminescent and the tree trunk an invitation. Both are unfixed.
"Everything [Miller] brings into the world of her painting is addressed as a living being, its character celebrated," painter Andrew Forge wrote. A visit to her show at the Jaffe-Friede is a quiet celebration and well worth the time.
Ruth Miller's exhibit in the Jaffe-Friede Gallery will show until October 31. She and Andrew Forge are currently living on campus and working in their Hopkins Center studios.
