Statement by Cassandra Langer, Critic & Art Historian, NY, N.Y.

LEE ANNE MILLER  (Catalogue of Painting, Houghton Gallery, The Cooper Union, NYC)

Seeing nature as a complex set of relationships changes the dynamics of landscape painting.  Picasso acknowledged this when he suggested that art, not being nature, must be something else.

Abstracting from herself in an intuitive and expressionistic style that focuses on personal expression as artistic play, Lee Anne Miller produces watercolors and oils that reflect upon the constant cycle of origin, growth and disintegration.  The artist’s work forces viewers to deal with paradoxes of continuation and stasis.

By combining shapes, lines, gestures and colors Miller simultaneously evokes real and imaginary appearances.  Her liberating impulses, with their abstracting descriptions, break down barriers between art and nature and hark back to an instinctual knowledge that moves inside us.

If art is not nature it may well be a statement of inner realities.  It is that energy that animates her art.  In Miller’s work it is the artist’s signature writ large.