This exhibit shows the development of Diane Miller’s work from
1960 to 2010, a span of 50 years. Selected pieces
over the decades were chosen to reveal the evolution of
themes, forms and materials.It is hoped that this presentation of
one artist’s effort to create a personal vision will be of
particular interest to our St. John’s art students who are
themselves struggling to find their voices amid the vast
possibilities for expression in our time. It can be quite a
surprising journey.
As in many artists’ body of work, one can see an unfolding of
preoccupations that begin early and are explored in various
ways. For example, the textures, light and changing
choreography of the natural world has always been a major
inspir- ation, while compassion for the victims of war has been a
recurrent theme if not the dominant one. An inclination
toward circular forms and a desire to work at the intersection of
reality and abstraction has also been there from the
beginning.
Drawing has always been the primary impulse, starting in
childhood. My father, a talented amateur, loved to paint and
I was lucky there was never any shortage of materials or
encouragement. I painted in oils and later,
acrylics, on canvas, throughout high school, college and grad
school, and always assumed I would be a “painter,” in the
traditional sense. After a while, though, I became
increasingly dissatisfied with the material which I found too
technically frustrating and heavy. I was happier working on
paper with pencil, charcoal and chalks, and developed a
technique of drawing with colored pencils on top of colored inks
which I found endlessly fascinating. Even at this early stage
I was delighted with the process of transparently layering one
material over another and playing with the interaction between the
layers.
There was also a problem of continuity. I became a mother in
1974 and again in 1977. Since I was working at home with two
little children I needed to find materials that I could pick
up and put down easily, that did not need to be worked with every
day before the paint dried, and also, that didn’t smell and were
not toxic. For many years I contented myself with drawing.
A big breakthrough came when I discovered papermaking. I had
become dissatisfied with the rectangle. Paper, canvas,
everything was rectangular! Why? The world was not
rectangular and our eyes are not rectangular. I started to
experiment with non-rectangular formats. This led me to
papermaking where I could create irregular sheets of paper and
semi-sculptural surfaces. At the same time I was exploring
printmaking: monotype, etching, collagraph, silk-screen, and less
familiar techniques such as gum bichromate prints, silicone
intaglio, and carborundum aquatint. I printed on many
different kinds of papers including fibrous ones and delicate,
nearly transparent Japanese papers. When I began to combine
my prints with my hand-made papers I found I had stumbled on an
original, flexible method that suited my expressive needs
perfectly. This style of
work has been my main technique for over 25 years.
I started by adding bits of prints to small circular
monotypes. As I got braver I added more and more pieces
of prints to bigger monotypes and to my own hand-made paper
forms. The process became more layered and textured to
the point of low relief. The format grew larger and I
added other materials such as mica, graphite and metallic
leaf. I began to sand between the layers, creating subtle
pentimento and transparent passages.
My aesthetic sense has been informed by my admiration for Japanese
and Chinese art, specifically Zen ink paintings of the Song dynasty
and Japanese architectural screens and crafts. Although my
methods and materials are certainly Western, I like to think that
my work has a certain “Asian” flavor in its attention
to natural forms without being literally
representational, in the straddling of reality and abstraction, in
spontaneity of execution, in an emphasis on movement and space and
the emergence of forms out of that space, and in the in the respect
for craftsmanship combined with “wabi-sabi” or a certain offhand
roughness of design. These artistic ideals are
aspirational; I can’t say that I feel satisfied that I have ever
achieved the elegance and deep calm that have so inspired me.
The exhibition ends with some examples of recent work that have
veered in a slightly different direction: collages of drawings and
prints that I call “Rearrange- ments.” These are pieces
that are cut up and rearranged in a grid of stripes to create
surfaces that are more active and less consciously directed than
the drawings from which they started. I am not sure
where this new direction will take me, but it’s part of the
excitement of creative work that one can never predict exactly
what
will eventually be born.
Diane Miller recently retired after teaching studio art for 41
years in the Department of Fine Arts of St. John’s University,
where she was known as Professor Diane Miller Himmelbaum.