Nick Miller, Yard, is on view at Rubicon Gallery, Dublin through October 27, 2012. This exhibition features Miller’s final Truckscape paintings, landscapes painted from the back of a truck that Miller converted to a studio in 2007. In addition to being a mobile studio environment, the truck interior became a formal element, framing the landscape in many of Miller’s paintings.
In an essay about Miller’s Truckscapes an exhibition at the New York Studio School in 2008, Peter Plagens wrote:
This type of compositional device—as common as street corner crowds in photography, and a staple of Sunday painters looking out through the windows of their summer homes—might have turned into a gimmick in the hands of an inferior artist. But it gave Miller, who deposits scraped-off paint from reworked sections of canvases on the walls around the door (a kind of road version of Francis Bacon’s London studio, now reconstructed in Dublin’s municipal museum, The Hugh Lane Gallery), an opportunity both to ratchet up his Cézannesque manipulations of the picture plane toward near-vertigo, and to construct a succinct and arresting metaphor for seeing (the landscape, outside the truck) versus thinking and feeling (the artist’s mind and heart, inside the truck). Miller’s frames-within-the-painting also gently allude to the studio comforts (the familiarity of the floor and the smell of oil paint) and protection—psychological as well as physical—the truck affords him. ‘It’s my tortoise shell,’ he says.
Bill Maynes short film about Nick Miller’s mobile studio, also created for the Studio School exhibition, remains one of my favorite videos.
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To view more of Nick Miller’s paintings visit his website.