Gareth Miller
Gareth Miller has been working in the creative industries pretty much all of his life – from industrial, graphic design and (in the old world) finished artwork through to painting, film and landscape design.
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Pretty much from the beginning, when he discovered Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column, three dimensionality has been a fundamental part of his artwork. Possibly because he is dyslexic, he has always seen in 3D, always tries to look in 3D and often constructs in 3D.
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He has always been interested in the juxtaposition of objects against each other; for example, when he was at art college in his teens, he had to draw clusters of wooden chairs stacked together to develop an ability to draw from the eye and to measure from the eye. That taught structure, depth and perspective.
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A childlike fascination
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The 3 dimensionality of a shape has always been a big thing for him as has the juxtaposition of one shape against another. Some of the earliest examples of this can be seen in the Minoan settlements on Crete or, if you walk around Padua or Siena or Florence. You can see how many hands and many eyes created spaces that now people flock to, and nobody can say one architect built that. It’s a creative collaboration between many anonymous craftsmen and draughtsmen over the centuries, creating these higgledy piggledy structures that are now beautiful things in the world. His detailed work, in both monochrome and colour, captures these historical streetscapes.
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Gareth's abstract work comes from his almost childlike fascination with the endless patterns that spring from the most unlikely, every day, places, and objects. Ordinary objects have extraordinary beauty, and he loves to interpret the landscapes that people have lived in for the past 1600 years or more.
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If you look at a set of boots upturned on a boot-stand, or flowers in a meadow, and how they are grouped, and the voids between them, there is an intrinsic beauty to the irregularity of what you are looking at. The spaces between speak.
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The spaces between speak
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Everyday things that he sees have an extraordinary beauty and appeal. He finds ordinary objects fascinating, like the cable ties that you get on electronic goods that can be twisted and formed into shapes, or wooden coffee sticks. He sees how they are made, looks at the grain and then puts them together and sees how they cross each other, then he sees them made into lattice. But each shape and each space, while having a uniformity to each other, is slightly different. So, even within the normal or the regular there is the irregular, the natural – like the leaf on a tree where the veins are all doing a job structurally, and while they are all basically the same they are also different.
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Gareth uses a variety of media but the principal medium he prefers is traditional Chinese brush and Chinese ink, because there is a quality, a density, and a fluidity with the Chinese brush that he has not found anywhere else in the world. Travelling to China to see some of these brushes in places like Tunxi is amazing. No two are alike and there are brushes from the size of a man to the size of a finger, with every shape and size in between. Each one has an unique effect.
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Artists that have influenced Gareth over the years and that he now holds dear are Eduardo Chillida, William Coldstream, Euan Uglow, Fabienne Verdier, Constantin Brancusi, Andy Goldsmith, Richard Long and the off this planet brilliance of Hans Holbein.
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