PETER MILLER
The distinguished American printmaker Peter Miller has worked over the past seven years in photogravure etching, the neglected European printmaking medium he has revived to express his personal vision of the Far East where he has lived for over twenty-five years. Recently centred on journeys Miller has made in northwest Mongolia, it is in this frontierland where the Gobi Desert, steppe grasslands, Altai Mountains and lake country come together, the artist travelled by horse or camel, staying close to the surface textures of landscape which have always fascinated him: rocks, sands, gopher holes, stream crossings, perhaps most of all those seas of grasses responding in endlessly shifting, semi-circular patterns to the pull of wind and weather.In his adoptive homeland of Japan Miller has for many years found his classic subjects in detail, be it natural, architectural or domestic, which expresses the whole: rocks in a stream, a roof under snow, a garlic bulb caught in shadow.  Now, in Mongolia, detail is still eloquent but space itself becomes his subject, with giant natural features standing in as detail: in the Altai Mountains glaciers translate into brilliant white bands against the sky; huge, mirage-like lakes appear out of morning mist.Working mostly in the classically restrained black and white of his chosen media, while introducing occasionally burnt umber, gold or blue inks in contrast, Miller brings to his experience of Mongolia an essentially meditative spirit nurtured by living for many years in an artistic community in urban Japan. 

Kamakura, Miller’s home city, is the city in Japan most closely associated with the emergence in the twelfth century of zen – an approach to enlightenment through discipline centred on an awareness of the changing present moment – and the craft of printmaking has in consequence a peculiar standing here.  In zen practice art does not serve to document events: it is its own justification in philosophic terms, which in painting or printmaking can mean the form ink takes on paper.  Beyond this, it is particularly well suited to provide a universal vision of man dwarfed by his environment.Situated, as Kamakura is, close to the sea, subject to frequent mists which generate that haunting light the Japanese term harugasumi, the surroundings in which Miller lives have undoubtedly fostered his fondness for surface and texture. 



Biography

Peter Miller was born in Philadelphia in 1945 and brought up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, developing an early passion for snow scenes, railroad tracks, rain on windows, steel mills, streetcars captured in juvenile award-winning photographs.  He was educated at Columbia University and Berkeley, California.  In 1977 Miller discovered Japan, moving there permanently in 1981.  Influenced by the work of the nineteenth century American artist Peter Henry Emerson, he set out to recover the photogravure technique, first explored by Fox Talbot and Niepce on the threshold of photography, as an ideal means of interpreting the mountains and garden landscapes of Japan with their echoes of Chinese ink-wash painting.  Since 1995 Peter Miller has held seventeen one man exhibitions in Tokyo, Kamakura, Yokohama, Osaka, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Cologne.  Prints of his have been acquired for the permanent collections of Cleveland Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Kamakura Museum of Modern Art and and the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian, where he is (with the exception of Whistler) the only American artist represented in a collection devoted to the art of Asia.  Solo Exhibitions with Francis Kyle Gallery 2000 and 2007.

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