Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art
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Judith Miller
- Additional Information -
Judith Miller
Nature Conserved
New Paintings and Works on Paper
Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art is proud to announce a solo exhibition by Judith S. Miller. In the 1970’s Ms Miller was involved in creating photographically based conceptual art. She was in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, and her work was purchased for the Whitney permanent collection. In the intervening years she has withdrawn from photography to focus on realist painting. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition marking this transition.
Miller’s paintings are keenly felt landscape. The site is closely studied, the details meticulous, the marks lyrical yet formally controlled. The images are infused with the artist’s delicate aesthetic and touch. Miller works very slowly, her handling of the space, location, light, its colors and details are done with a great deal of thought. It’s as if her psyche blends with her subject to calm the extraneous leaving us with a visual truth.
On the occasion of her show *Karen Swenson, poet and journalist, wrote this essay for Judith S. Miller:
The natural world of Judith Miller’s paintings is a vertiginous place. In almost all, one has a sense of falling into the canvas. These are not observed surfaces; they enclose, enveloping the observer. Her depths are full of layers of sight, suggesting strata perhaps psychological and spiritual as well as visual, in which life and death, burgeoning and decay teem.
We move through transparent layers, often reflections, beneath which there are further depths. Displaced, unbalanced, back and forth between these levels we are in continuous movement, never at rest; never secure in our sense of whether we are at depth or surface. In this movement one loses and finds details again. Often there is distortion through water or light over which a branch, stem or leaf floats undistorted. In the depths is distortion; on the surface is reality? But the undistorted is no more real than that which has been distorted. These two phenomena are equal in our sight. Sometimes the distortion transforms an object into something new, as the building in the painting, Pond Reflection WFC/NYC, becomes a golden net.
Miller’s canvases are precisely painted with a stroke whose transparency echoes the light in which her subject matter exists.
*Ms Swenson’s most recent book of poetry is "A Daughter’s Latitude"
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