Stuart Shils talks to Ruth Miller Forge about her paintings on the occasion of the recent exhibition Elisa Jensen & Ruth Miller: Place and Passage at the New York Studio School.

Miller comments: “I’m not interested in describing the object. I’m interested in presence, the weight, the mass, relationships. It’s not about describing things. I don’t think that is enough -I think that’s nothing really. In the setup I put together, after the presence, the relationships, then they begin to look back at me, especially these things that I’m choosing to paint. They begin to look back at me at a point in the work, almost like a portrait. But again, they’re not portraits of individual objects. I hope they’re not. But this is, I think, the tension in my work and the battle in my work.”