Taking a journey through interpretive landscapes
story & photos by Nancy Falconer
For the last seven years local Ontario painter Sue Miller has been chasing her muse between her native Southern Georgian Bay region and the rugged coast of Perry’s Cove, Newfoundland, captivated by the Atlantic Ocean and the people who live there.
It comes, therefore, as no surprise that ocean and sky are two of the three principal elements in her richly textured oil paintings (the other being land, “for groundedness”). Driven by a lifelong passion for the environment, the ever-present water, land and sky – elements that dominate in both locations – prevail in many of her landscape paintings, and lead the viewer to a quiet inner world, layered in mystery and complex emotion.
While her work is reasonably well known in this region, it has also been very successful in attracting a much broader audience. Many of Miller’s pieces hang in private collections across Europe and North America, as well as in galleries throughout Canada. She is, in fact, in high favour offshore at the moment. As one gallery owner describes her art: “There’s an incredible warmth to her work, an emotional realism, and people are drawn to it.”
Suffused with metaphor, Miller’s dream-like landscapes stimulate the subconcious (we feel like some part of us knows this landscape) while embracing the universal connection between nature and man. As Bonnie Leyton, owner of Leyton Gallery in St. John’s, Nfld., which exhibits Miller’s work, puts it: “Her style is emotional and easily readable,” adding, “There are no hard lines in it. There’s a kind of movement throughout her canvas from one corner to another that keeps your attention.” Leyton sums it up while underscoring Miller’s appeal, “You really feel you can move into her paintings.”
Her evocative landscape scenes, dream-like and subtly vague, stir deeper waters within, and perhaps it’s that very invocation to ‘flow into the mystic’ and find oneself in her paintings that challenges some local audiences and absolutely delights others. Either way, it unquestionably puts Miller’s work into a sophisticated category that bears no relationship to ‘home décor’ or ‘decorative art.’ but rather bears witness to an unassailable authenticity.
Growing up in a cottage community north of Orillia, Miller spent much of her childhood “at the beach in a canoe just paddling around and being inspired by water, by nature, by the forest itself.” To this day she continues to find her connectedness in the environment, and this is reflected in her paintings. “I’m always looking for patterns and parallels in life and nature,” she confesses.
The rivers run deep and it’s those patterns and parallels that pull the viewer into her intuitive world of earth, water, and sky, where angst and hope, dark and light, draw you into a philosophical – and beautiful – ambiguity of time and place. Is it before the storm or after? Is hope the guide or hope the goal? Are we there yet?
“It’s not so much about the actual physical scene in front of me,” explains Miller, referring to the imagery in her landscapes, “but about the culmination of all the landscapes I’ve seen in my life that have had impact on me. I’m just trying to grasp a fleeting aspect of those memories.”
Miller’s authenticity impacts viewers in a unique way, says Leyton. “People are always struck by her work. It doesn’t matter where it is in the gallery. It’s the kind of warmth she expresses, and beauty and feeling – and it can be re-interpreted because it’s not ‘realistic’ painting – they can make their own story out of the sky or a hill or a house.”
The roots of this beautiful ambiguity can be sourced in Miller’s ‘intuitive’ approach to painting. Using music as a meditative backdrop, she approaches the canvas without a predetermined image in her mind. “When I put on the music, I just try to tap into myself,” she muses. Moving into a meditative state where thinking has ceased and her mind is a blank, she’s “in a zone where I’m just looking at the colour and the texture that are happening on the canvas, and, as I’m painting, an image starts to appear and make sense.”
Painting solely with a palette knife, preferring it to a brush, Miller integrates her unique colour palette with a warm undercoat, allowing the latter to come through in places, lending light and movement to the imagery. “I love the texture you can achieve,” she says of the palette knife technique, “the layering that happens. It loosens up the painting, and allows me to become less concerned with details. It creates much more movement and energy.”
Kate Ramos of The Edge Gallery in Barrie, which carries some of Miller’s paintings, admits to being ‘heavily into texture’ and loves the movement and colour in her work. Ramos recently sold a Miller painting to a client who is building a new house around the piece – every gallery owner and artist’s dream!
Lyne Burek, owner of Mad & Noisy Gallery in Creemore, also carries Miller’s work, both large and small. Her ‘mini-Millers’ (small 4×4-inch oils) often sell in multiples at one go. “She’s one in a million,” observes Burek. “She has a very different style. She’s very much her own person and it comes out through her art.”
For Miller, it goes without saying that a painting should create a connection between the artist and the audience. A client caught sight of Miller’s ‘Tempest’ on exhibit, and was struck by a self-confessed coup de foudre – “I walked into the room and the second I saw it I loved it! I couldn’t take my eyes off it!” Like all of Miller’s work, it stirred in the viewer – soon-to-be the owner – something deeper and more personal. “When I bought this picture, my life was upside down and crazy. This pulled me in and calmed me down.”
Like all good art, it will continue to be a calming and ethereal presence, drawing you into the mystic. ❧
