ARTIST’S STATEMENT: Lee Anne Miller
From earliest memory I have been intrigued by the forms and forces of nature. Early on, my sense of color, atmosphere and form was strongly influenced by the natural environment surrounding me in the West. These roots provided me with a rich exposure to a dramatic and varied landscape, which provided an early framework for a visual language.
The creation of a work of art never seems definable or repeatable but always retains something of the mysterious. The language of paint presents interpretation and metamorphosis, sometimes combining the simulation of the real with the ambiguity of the abstract.
Generally, I work in a series, whereby I focus for a period of time on a particular theme, location or idea. Personal experiences with nature are interpreted and enhanced through observation, imagination and memory. These elements of nature are transformed through various degrees of abstraction, preserving some ambiguous and enigmatic characteristics.
From the Curator
Excerpt from Linda Jones Gibbs, Art Historian and Curator of Exhibition,
Lee Anne Miller: Nature Transformed
From an art historical perspective, Miller is a consummate modernist, utilizing color and form to achieve not only desired aesthetic ends but for personal expression. Her modernist disposition is also evident in her unabashed love of the medium of paint and the physical act of painting. Her works are visceral, luminous, and alive. Her ability to retain a sense of both spontaneity and tremendous control, particularly in the layered pigments of her watercolors, is superb.
Miller’s enjoyment of her craft is not limited to the actual laying down of pigment. It is the entire creative process that involves a certain intuitive reverie. Her aesthetic sensibilities and interpretive vision take over where optics leaves off. Her images extend deeper than the surface of color and brushstroke to suggest truths about nature that exist beyond our everyday powers of seeing.
While her paintings all have their origin in landscape, they are not literal transcriptions of nature. One senses that Miller, at times, is attempting to tap into the universe’s creative center to capture the life force itself. The very energy that animates the forms of nature seems to implode the forms in her art.
