April
4 , 2003 ‘You
Can’t Hurry the Soul’: A Visit with Artist Marion
Miller
| 
Photo:
Fred LeBlanc
Marion
(Bonnie) Miller poses
with some of her portraits. |
Marion (Bonnie) Miller,
a professor of art who joined Mount Holyoke’s faculty in
1976, is a master of light; her exquisite landscapes and seascapes,
her portraits and self-portraits, and her quietly observed equestrian
paintings all have one thing in common—a marvelous sensitivity
to light, not only to its visual presence but to the subtle emotions
it can convey. So it seems entirely appropriate that her new home
and studio, tucked away at the top of a wooded hill in Belchertown
and designed to her specifications, is filled with light. On a
sunny winter day, numerous large windows not only flood the interior
spaces of the house with light, they also afford views of apple
trees, horses and barn, and surrounding fields and hills.
Miller, who recently
moved in, is taking a leave of absence and will return to teaching
in the fall. She’s using her time off to get her new studio
organized and to undertake some portrait commissions. She recently
completed two paintings of the Honorable James L. Oakes, senior
judge in the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit; next
up is a portrait of the Honorable Bruce M. Selya, judge in the
U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit. But the biggest honor is
the commission she received to paint the official portrait of
former Smith College acting president John Connolly. “I’m
just beginning the Connolly portrait,” she says. “The
first thing we did was walk around the Smith campus to see previous
portraits of presidents and discuss his preferences.”
Painting commissioned portraits presents special challenges, says
Miller. “I try to know as well as I can who a person is
and get a general sense of how this person relates to their world.
Some of the people I’ve painted are very busy and there’s
not much time for them to sit, so often we have only one or two
initial meetings.” Then, she says, “I try to be the
most intense observer I possibly can—just watching the nuances
of what catches this person’s interest, what their special
rhythms are.”
A portrait, according
to Miller—whether it’s a formal painting on which
she spends hours, or a quick sketch of a friend—“is
really about the truth of someone’s else’s reality.”
One room of her new home contains a half dozen or so portraits
she has done over the years of Mount Holyoke colleagues. Her goal
for these small, informal paintings is “to catch a specific
genuine moment of reality, and that means, inevitably, a moment
of reality between us. A moment of interrelationship.”
Miller has witnessed many interesting “moments of interrelationship”
while painting portraits. Once she worked on the portrait of a
friend who was restive with what he experienced as a boring job
of sitting. “The painting refused to progress,” Miller
says. “When we finally talked about the stalemate and he
understood the kind of singular focus the process required of
me, he stopped expecting a social encounter. When he dissolved
that wall of expectations, the energy field between us cleared
of resistance and that little painting just flowed out. And that
was my first education as to how profoundly interrelational portrait
painting is. You think you’re one person looking at another,
but there are all kinds of currents of connection between you.”
Miller’s portrait of Mount Holyoke English professor and
poet Sarah Youngblood, who died in 1980, hangs in a reading room
of the Williston Library. During the years when Youngblood taught
in the English department, Miller had asked her if she’d
like to sit but, being “profoundly humble and modest,”
says Miller, Youngblood declined. But when Youngblood was diagnosed
with cancer, the poet came to Miller and said, “Well, it’s
time for that portrait.” They completed it in three evenings,
says Miller, during which an amazing thing happened. “Sarah,
who was so private but such a powerful personality, just made
herself available. I believe Sarah was asking that painting to
bear the weight of who she was. There was something about her
clarity that loaned itself to the painting,” Miller recalls.
“I use this
word a little carefully,” she says, “but I do think
that it’s a kind of sacred thing that painting can do, to
take on that weight. When I look at any of the late Rembrandts
or Velasquez’s Las Meninas, for example, there
is something presented there about whole life spans, whole configurations
of subjectivity, that is just remarkable. And when that’s
the result of the painting, you can be sure it has something to
do with the time the painting took in the making.”
Miller, who teaches introductory and intermediate painting courses
and Advanced Studio Art, finds that the importance of taking time
is “really hard to teach. In the first semester of painting
I try to set up situations where the students do as much work
as possible and in the second semester to go more for situations
where they’re working on sustained projects and working
in series.” The superficial, technical side of painting
doesn’t take too long to learn, Miller says. “But
any real grasp of the process takes experience, commitment, and
psychological investment, and you can’t hurry the soul.”
In addition to teaching painting, Miller has also taught the Five
College Advanced Seminar in Drawing, which is taught by a coordinator
and two faculty from each of the Five Colleges. The students work
on assigned projects but also develop their own work. “It’s
very intensive and exciting,” Miller says. “Our hope
is that it gives them a suggestion of what graduate school will
be like.” “The Five College drawing seminar was one
of the best courses I’ve taken at Mount Holyoke,”
says senior art major Alison Paquette. “It is a unique and
rare experience to work with so many different professors and
get to know students from all Five Colleges and their work. Bonnie
led our weekly critiques, and I would come back inspired by all
the feedback I was able to get.”
Once all the boxes are unpacked and she has completed the portrait
commissions, Miller plans to resume working on her paintings of
horses, which have been shown twice in solo exhibitions at First
Street Gallery in New York and reviewed in NY Arts Magazine. “I’m
aching to get started,” Miller says. “Things don’t
make sense in my life unless I’m painting, which is quite
the way it should be.”
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