Bonnie Miller's most recent painting exhibition, Horses Indoors, opened last week in New York. Canvases from this series that weren't finished in time for the exhibition are shown behind Miller. Esteemed art critic Sir Lawrence Gowing wrote in a New York Times review of her earlier work, "[Miller's] image is always beautifully done with the consistent and exact delicacy that is, I think, [hers] alone in the whole of present figure painting."
Painter Marion "Bonnie" Miller surrounds herself with artistic inspiration. Her home is full of light, art volumes, and fresh flowers, and her own paintings are everywhere. Languid cloudscapes from Tanzania, France, and Wellfleet line the dining room. Self-portraits stare back from the living room walls. Canvases are stacked three deep along the hallway. Ironically, there's no painting where many showcase their finest: over the fireplace. One bedroom has a crowd of portraits viewing visitors with equanimity.
"The portraits started with my musing on why we paint from life in the twentieth century, when we have the camera," Miller explains. "I wanted to see if the paintings would bear the weight of that question." In a series of self-portraits, Miller repeats the inquiry and "asks form to hold the response." She has called painting "the process of seeing rendered concretely. Painting is visual intelligence at work."
Her works have surface appeal--intriguing forms captured in carefully arranged daubs of paint--and reward closer inspection with deeper significance. As she says, "Things are always more complicated than they appear. Structure in painting is in many ways the most important element, and is often hidden to the first glance." The placement of the body, its gestures, and the balance of filled to empty space all form a "dance" that brings meaning, she says. She also likes the "tradition of scrupulous honesty" in portrait painting for which she feels Rembrandt's work is the ultimate model.
Miller has been making art for as long as she can remember. Although she trained when abstract expressionism was in vogue, she remains a figurative artist whose work has been compared to masters such as Vermeer and Degas.
The most recent in an impressive lineup of exhibitions opened last week at New York's respected First Street Gallery. Horses Indoors focuses on the casual workaday world of horse and rider. For these paintings, Miller combined her love of dressage with an interest in painting the effects of light. "Dressage is so precise a form of riding that a millimeter's shift in weight has meaning for horse and rider. In painting, too, a millimeter can change shape and meaning," she explains.
Holding herself to high standards of anatomical accuracy, Miller did sketches, and took stacks of horse photos for reference. When she was struck by something--a rectangle of sunlight or the vertical-horizontal intersection of horse and rider--this compositional idea would become a new painting. Despite beginning the series three years ago, Miller was still making changes the week the gallery show opened.
Whether painting horses or portrait commissions--which have included two poets laureate, novelist John Irving, and several judges--Miller seeks to make visible her sitter's ineffable spirit. "I am as still and quiet in myself as possible so it's not my ego I'm painting," she says, adding that the process of painting and being painted builds intimacy in which "magical interactions" can occur. Her portraits glow with such moments.
Making art and teaching it are connected for Miller, though she keeps her studio off campus. "I love to teach art because it's bigger than the individual artist. It's fabulous to introduce others to art, because through it we learn enormous amounts about ourselves, about being part of the human species, and about issues affecting all of us. I want to help students get a glimmer of that, whether they turn that glimmer into a profession or not."
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