The Animal Art of Melissa Miller (by William Lynn)
There is a lovely essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the animal art of Melissa Miller. The text is excerpted below. Alongside the beauty of the work, what struck me was the subject of animal art being a career sin for artists. Shades of my conversation with the curators at the Ashmolean Museum several years ago! See Animal Art: Ashes and Snow. If the Chronicle’s treatment of Miller’s work is any indication, this self-absorbed anthropocentric prejudice may be changing.
Melissa Miller doesn’t play by the rules. She has willingly committed serious sins for a contemporary American artist: She paints animals, she composes narratives and allegories, she deals openly with sentiment and feeling, her sources are in both Asian and European art, her treatment of nature is not mediated or ironic, and she lives in Texas. …
Never obvious or one-note, Miller’s paintings enjoy a poetic ambiguity that generates feeling and sparks the imagination. Despite various shifts in style over the years, the open-ended lyricism of her work has remained a constant. After achieving acclaim in the early 80s for action-packed narratives set in lush imaginary pastures, oceans, and jungles, she turned to more symbol-laden allegories, including supernatural and spectral creatures. In more recent paintings and watercolors, she has presented pastoral tableaux that demonstrate a becalmed, prescriptive serenity. Miller’s development evinces her continuing engagement with the natural world, one that reflects our complex and often contradictory relationships with animals. …
After the turmoil of her earlier paintings, Miller’s pacific settings seem well earned. These are the mature reflections of more than two decades of thinking about the role of animals in our culture and the hierarchy of power in society. The tolerance portrayed in the works depends on the domesticated animals’ transcendence of violent instincts, primal fears, and rivalries of breed. The tranquil, trouble-free groupings describe a barnyard utopia that clearly might serve as a model for our species. Presented with good-natured, deadpan humor, Miller’s pastoral paintings realize a fanciful wish fulfillment, a vision of peace in our own back forty. …
Miller’s paintings explore issues basic to both beast and man, such as power, instinct, affection, transformation, fantasy, tolerance, and betrayal. Shaping allegorical tableaux through her poetic sensibility, Miller has created a complex body of work that melds our experiences with those of other species, reflecting the symbiotic relationship of all living things.
The paintings, by Melissa Miller, and text, by Michael Duncan, a corresponding editor for Art in America, are from the book Melissa Miller, just published by the University of Texas Press. (http://chronicle.com, 15 June 2007, Section: The Chronicle Review, Volume 53, Issue 41, Page B15)
You can see more of her work online at websites like www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/miller_melissa.html.
Photos: Melissa Miller, 2000, Sheep, oil on canvas; Melissa Miller, 1985, Zebras and Hyenas, oil on canvas.
William Lynn :: Jun.22.2007 :: Art, Human-Animal Studies :: No Comments »