Causeway, 2021. Oil on canvas, 38 x 38 inches.     



Ken Miller Lights up Trimper Gallery



by Benjamin Genocchio 



“I am a painter, an artist. I am driven to paint and so I do,” says Ken Miller, the subject of a beguiling retrospective exhibition at Trimper Gallery in Greenwich. Miller, 60, draws on his passion for nature (he lives in East Hampton) to paint representational, softly focused, colorful paintings of the world around him. “Everything I paint is drawn from reality,” he says, “but it is a more exaggerated version. That is the world that I create.”



Black & White Koi, 2020.  Oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches.


Butterfly Koi, 2021. Oil on canvas, 48 x 48 inches.  



The artist never draws or sketches out the thoughts he has for paintings. “That’s too confining and restrictive,” he says. “The paint and canvas is a fluid sculpture with hidden delights and pleasures emerging as I go.” When seated in his studio in front of an empty canvas he waits until he gets a compelling idea of what he wants to paint before lifting his brush. He then just visualizes his subjects in terms of shape, form, and color.


The present show includes 35 works spanning two decades. Miller worked previously as a model and photographer and his background in photography is evident. His paintings often resemble cropped photographs, the artist zeroing in on some portion of a broader landscape or scene that interests him. His subject matter, once isolated, is blown up to a larger scale and then, amplified with rich color, committed to canvas with a startlingly vivid attention to form and detail. 



Left:  White Dove Arum Lily, 2021. Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. Right: To the Heavens, 2023. Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches.  



As a result of his process, the paintings tend to be both realistic and imaginative, even surrealistic, which makes them visually ambiguous. Is this real, or not, you find yourself asking as you stand in front of his imagery of coastal landscapes populated with blocky, voluminous rocks, that look like paintings by Winslow Homer crossed with Edward Hopper tinged with a spiritual feeling. His landscapes are foreboding and strange. 



Part of the mystery in his paintings derives from the fact that there is no wider context for the little bits of reality that fill his images — we don't know what we are looking at or where, even if the subject itself is seemingly self-evident. The coastal scenes, for example, are based on some iPhone images of the Pacific Northwest coast sent to him by a friend. He later made a trip out there to see it in person but he paints from memory.


The photographic quality of his painting is most apparent in his series “The Colors of India.” The artist began this series in 2013, depicting groups of Indian women gathered together, sitting and waiting outdoors or preparing and serving food. The paintings look like snapshots of market scenes, the sort of culturally real but exotic subject matter attracting tourists to India on vacation. Intense color takes the paintings to a level where again we are forced to question their realism, even reality.  


Miller’s paintings are all pretty much characterized by dramatic and intense color, with the exception here of paintings from his popular series depicting koi carp inspired by a fish pond at the home of one of his East Hampton neighbors. Sometimes he uses color but the most resonant paintings are those in black and white, the artist painstakingly illustrating the form of the fish and their movement, tumbling and swishing through water. 



The Colors of India 2, 2015. Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches.  





Purple Sky, 2022. Oil on canvas 40 x 60 inches.

The imaginative potential of a subject is what interests him, it seems to me, not the truth, though he seems to take great care in painting the koi and human figures accurately. His ability to project onto the blank canvas fluid dreams and fantasy, or a version of truth, is interesting and compelling, everything delivered in condensed, rhythmic forms that imbue his imagery with sensual, even sublime power. 


Take for example his East End landscapes, one with a patch of little pumpkins beneath a surrealistic purple sky, or trees silhouetted in a spooky moonlight, and which seem to be less about reconnecting with nature, as is conventional in much contemporary landscape painting, as to suggest we never really had a connection to nature at all — though beautiful, nature is for Miller a remote and abstract world. Escapism is an underlying subject, it seems, but for him there is nowhere else to go.





Synergy in Color  


Ken Miller’s Greenwich Debut Exhibition  
in Support of ALS United Connecticut 


Through November 5, 2024

Trimper Gallery

40 West Putnam Avenue

Greenwich, CT
trimpergallery.com




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