ON CENTER
The Salvaged, January - March 2009, Vol. XXI, No. 1 by Jake Seniuk
If personal circumstances haven’t yet convinced us, the all-pervasive 21st century news-and-infotainment media roundly remind us that we are living in a millennial age, where old paradigms will rapidly transform or disappear. Not since the 1960s has there been such widespread awareness of history being made while we eat breakfast or walk the dog. Even here on the Olympic Peninsula, in the remove offered by our natural remoteness in the upper left hand corner of the federation, there is a sense of great witness to a very new — but still unrecognizable — future unfolding.
Michael Paul Miller arrived in Port Angeles in September to assume the key faculty position in Peninsula College’s expanding fine arts program. With a recently minted MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Miller takes on dual roles in the studio and in the lecture hall, balancing the practice of art with the history of art. Because his monumental canvases are shaped by an acute awareness of past and contemporary masters, and because his themes aspire towards prescience of an unknowable future, he bodes to be an influential mentor to budding artists, inspiring students to probe deeply into the significance of their own work and their own futures.
The Port Angeles Fine Arts Center begins the new year with Miller’s debut exhibition titled The Salvaged, comprised of aggressively large canvases populated by a rag-tag fraternity of survivors, who languish and loiter in dystopian tableaux. Realistically rendered with confident painterly control, people, objects and landscapes combine to hint at underlying narratives that spring from the aftermath of possibly apocalyptic events.
In “The Calling,” for example, Miller confronts the viewer with the image of a seemingly abandoned girl walking away from a house in flames. With her hair upswept in a bun and her face fixed in a hardened glare, she looks prematurely aged as she advances along a crude road defined by the wide tread marks that a now-vanished truck has left behind. The burning building over her shoulder stands isolated against a rolling landscape of wintery fields and smoke-choked sky. The waif’s faux-fur-trimmed coat hangs loosely on her with the allure of a womanhood she may yet grow into if she endures this current hijacking by fate. A frayed twist of anchor rope dangles from her right hand curled up against the cold, hidden within the broad cuffs of her pink coat.
The artist provides us with ample details and clues that are the elements of a narrative, leaving the bulk of the action for the viewer to intuit and invent. The choreography of Miller’s characters are traceries of an ongoing tale, but it is up to the viewer to imagine the events that have already transpired or are yet to happen beyond the boundaries of the picture frame, that hard rectangle which walls off this moment from the continuum of space and time.
But these are paintings, not short stories, and in paintings nothing is hidden and everything happens at once. The totality of the artist’s creation is always in view, for a glimpse or for hours of our detailed attention. Through skillful composition — enticing the eye with line, color, texture and rhythm — the artist sets up paths for our attention to travel. Where we choose to enter a path, in which direction we proceed, and where we end the journey are the keys to our interpretation of what we are seeing and what its significance might be.
Through controlled dynamic relationships among the elements of a painting, the artist elevates form to symbol and shifts the viewer’s awareness from the physical to the mental. When forms are locked into the language of Realism, as Miller’s are, everyday appearances take on a second nature as symbols and point to a more probing realization of what we are looking at.
Michael Paul Miller was born and raised in rural central Wisconsin. One of his enduring early memories is the burning of the fields by which farmers cleared the spent harvest and readied the land for a spring renewal. The pall of smoke that hung over the vast open spaces of the heartland left a stale stench that lingered in the air. Later, in the hands of Michael the artist, the tamed and scarred landscape becomes a foreboding presence, a vacuum in which figures appear dwarfed and vulnerable, in a raw existential state. With scant exposure to the fine arts in his small town upbringing, Michael’s untapped potential found its own metaphorical identity in these smoldering empty fields.
Miller’s notion of The Salvaged began to take shape in 2004, as working towards his Master’s certification, he searched for a personal vision. Absorbing lessons from modern American Realist masters such as Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, and contemporary post-Surrealists like Odd Nerdrum and Bo Bartlett, Miller honed his natural facility for rendering. His deft brushwork revels in its own painterly nature almost as much as in the imagery assembled from the hand’s myriad strokes.
Although coming of age when the seamlessness of digital technologies tempt the documentarian of invented history to dabble in collages comprised of visual samplings fished from the ocean of public images and pastiched together into a quilt of contemporary culture, Miller prefers to harness the power and versatility of oil paint and the long established canons that have shaped easel art since the Renaissance. The oil pigment’s rich and lustrous body, coupled with the forgiveness of its slow drying, allows the painter to build lush surfaces with deliberation and precision, positing himself as the pure and all-powerful creator of a universe of his own invention. The paint’s plasticity creates a second skin of nature that substitutes well for the Real, at almost any scale.
Miller’s large canvases resemble Cinemascope freeze-frames writ on a screen so large that it pulls the viewer into the action. He draws on a long lineage of history painting — those grandiose studio reenactments of iconic events and characters that preceded photography and cinema, and were intended to preserve for posterity the imagined and/or observed past. But Miller’s paintings seem more like clairvoyant snapshots of an uncertain future.
Following his inspirator, Wyeth, Miller uses his talent for capturing the play of light to craft strong surface textures, infusing his renderings of the everyday with psychological timbres. His dark and saturated palette yields subdued tones, well suited for conveying distressed atmospheres that evoke disaster, destruction, and desolation.
From whence do these scenes originate?” a perplexed viewer might ask while wandering through Miller’s unsettling painterly episodes. In his artist’s statement he answers with, “I draw upon moments of my youth, coincidences, dreams, thoughts, religious beliefs, and other people…” That’s a rather broad inventory of mental pictures that spill from his memory and his imagination and then fragment to selected bits that slowly compost on the canvas. Miller does no preparatory sketches beyond the broadest geometric schematics scribbled on a napkin, and the flexibility of oil paint allows him to erase and rework constantly as the scene evolves before his eyes.
There is an element of happenstance in Miller’s compositions that owes as much to Surrealism as to Naturalism. The most basic tenet of Surrealist art was that of the chance encounter, whether that takes place at a street corner or in some recess of the psyche. Like dreams or visions, Miller’s staged encounters seem governed by a hidden agenda of the subconscious mind. The constellation of scene and actors appears random at first blush, and then becomes revelatory upon deeper reflection.
Figures in Miller’s tableaux inhabit charged landscapes and are presented head-on as environmental portraits of a kind, where the subject’s surroundings reflect his or her inner state. Presenting environments that have been disturbed by man-made and/or natural violence, this twenty-something artist taps the anxiety of his generation to create an atmosphere of controlled desperation, rife with intimations of unresolved dangers. His characters often project their searching gazes beyond the boundaries of the canvas — where they meet the returned gaze of their creator (the artist) and their witness (the viewer), who are both ready to acknowledge any confession with which these survivors of one contemporary trauma or another might unburden themselves.
The Salvaged is a rogues’ gallery depicting fresh-faced encounters with the demons next door, who visit us in private when we are most alone. Even when multiple characters stitch a scene together, they may share a moment in time, yet betray no visible interaction. Each is rapt in pondering his or her own destiny like some somnambulist in daylight.
Roads figure prominently in almost every painting, mostly in the background, indicating a hope for exit from the situation. They enable the intrusion of invading forces as well. In “Overpass” a man and a woman are encountered on a concrete sky-bridge, as oily smoke billows from somewhere below, its source hidden by the barrier wall of the overpass. The orange safety-vested young woman is slumped with her back against the barrier, eyes shut to her situation. She is missing one shoe and has parked her spiked trash impaler against the chipped wall like a spear or harpoon. Her accomplice clutches a partly filled plastic refuse sack and has turned his back to her with a scowl. The interstate below races across the plains towards a murky horizon passing other fires in the distance.
Are these workers on a rest break taking refuge from a controlled burn below, or is this a lull in an accident scene where provocation and consequence wait in the wings? The woman’s splay-legged pose, the dangling sack, the upright pole, the thrusting orthogonal of the road, the acrid billowing smoke —all contribute as symbols to a Freudian analysis of sexual tensions between male and female. At the same time an atmosphere of cataclysm infects the mood that paints this pair as refugees from a larger malaise spreading across the land.
Miller’s slash and burn scorched fields imagery is reminiscent of the earth-encrusted canvases of German neo-Expressionist Anselm Kiefer, who metaphorically reshuffled the grisly aftertaste of World War II scattered over the German heartland. In Miller’s work there persists a similar tone of the consequences of mass delusion burning all in its path. To further unearth the heartland of mid-America, Miller expands his format in some paintings by appending a shelf that juts from the picture plane at right angles. Filled with charred debris it has leapt out from the canvas into the real world and created a moat of sorts that both bridges and divides physical representation from physical presence.
“Devotion” might be seen as an archetypal self-portrait that plays to qualities of character more than to physical likeness. An aproned workman has stepped off the edge of a burning field on to a swale of bare earth. He stands at parade rest extending a shovel at arm’s length like a rifleman awaiting his command. His fine features, long hair and full beard type him as a sensitive and introspective sort, perhaps an artist or a craftsman. A tire track parallels the canvas edge crossing the guy ropes that tether a blue tarpaulin hem to tent stakes at his feet, signs of a temporary shelter that has collapsed offstage, perhaps as a result of the vehicle’s passage. Behind him wet garments and towels sway in the breeze like prayer flags as a hot front of flames and smoke advances towards him across the meadow.
“I use the figure as a way to explore the bewilderment of existence and the will to survive,” Miller muses as he contemplates the fate of the beleaguered characters who are The Salvaged. “To the great extent at which the paintings embody bewilderment,” he further reflects, “they also hint at an underlying notion of purpose and possible providence.”
To salvage is a redemptive action, but it provides no means to save a person or a thing intact. To salvage is to save the vital elements and then recycle and reform them into some thing or someone new. That necessitates a process of distillation and reduction, followed by rebuilding.
Miller’s salvaged ones are emblematic of our dawning era of diminishment and retrenching, of restoring hope to a world whose spent resources and spiritual impotence will require new and leaner tools for coping. As in true history paintings, Miller’s scenes of burning fields and salvaged souls are records of a personal, social and environmental crucible in which new paradigms of survival are taking shape.
- Jake Seniuk - Executive Director/Curator - Port Angeles Fine Arts Center
