Submitted by the San Juan Island Museum of Art
A rare opportunity to take a workshop with the talented and incomparable Joe Miller is being offered by the San Juan Islands Museum of Art.
“Four Forests: Walking and Drawing” will be offered in four sessions on Tuesdays: Sept. 12 – Oct. 3, from 1 to 4 p.m. The students may use any medium or mediums on paper. Possibilities include color and graphite pencils, oil or chalk pastels or brush with pen and ink.
The last day to register is Aug. 29 and the class size is limited to 12. For details and sign-up go to www.sjima.org or call Malinda Dreyer at 378-2918
With a sketchpad in hand, Miller will visit each student as they work to offer help and suggestions.
“We are together on the Earth — Mountains are rising, streams are falling — all about us is constant growth and decay,” said Miller. “We get lost in our drawing; we find ourselves by discovering a hidden trail, then lost again. Then found.”
Miller is an established painter who has the ability to combine expressive color with elegant, minimal, confident lines to create dynamic compositions that evoke an aspect of the natural world.
Miller studied drawing and painting at the University of Notre Dame, earned a BFA at the University of Utah, and an MS in Art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
His work has been shown in galleries in the Mid-West, Southwest and Northwest with two significant traveling group shows “Rediscovering the Landscape of the Americas: Paintings from Mexico, Canada, and U.S.A.” and “The Artist as Native: Reinventing Regionalism.”
Over the last year and a half, Miller has had two solo exhibitions in New York City and participated in a group show in Southampton, NY. His most recent New York City solo show, entitled Joe Miller: Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, took place from October- December 2013 at Artsource International, a contemporary art/loft gallery space in New York’s Flatiron district and included 14 works.
Over the course of his almost five decades as an artist, Joe Miller has received honors and awards for his work. His work earned him an NEA Artist in Residence grant for three of the United States’ most spectacular national parks: Arches, Bryce Canyon and Zion.
In addition to catalog publications and awards, two previous films were made about the artist: “The Joe Miller Painting a Painting for a Film Film,” produced by Roger Darbonne of Oxnard, California; and “A Sense of Place: The Artist and the American Land,” a two-hourocumentary, produced by Nebraska Educational Television.
