Noel Miller
Noel Miller took up painting and drawing later in life. Until 2002, he worked in health politics for organisations such as the Australian Medical Association. He had a true epiphany one Sunday afternoon in a particularly boring board meeting,
Miller says: "I stood up and told them I was going. I was fed up. They looked at me with derisive smiles on their faces and so I had to go through with it. I hadn't contemplated it prior to that moment. I went home and said to my partner that I had just quit my job and he said to me: "now you can do what you always wanted to do". So, I started to paint full time. I love my life."
Miller paints in the outback where he holds annual Artists' Camps with his friend, artist Annabel Tully. He works in a variety of media. His charcoals, which he calls his iconic women, are highly prized by collectors, and his landscapes of the Australian outback evoke strong love of country. He shows a collection of his Antarctic work each year on board the MV Discovery in Antarctica where he spends three months of the year.
More recently he has won a residency in Sweden to be taken up in June 2009 followed by a month painting in the bush on Cape York at the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve.
Artist statement
As an artist I have no problem in saying that my subject matter is what I love to paint. As a writer I am capable of making complex statements about my feelings and emotions and what I want to express, but I am afraid that I just want to produce a work of art that gives people a good feeling. That makes them want to have that piece hanging in a special place in their home.
So, as a result, I am a bit of a chameleon, producing three different styles of work that could in fact be three different artists. I think this is also because the particular media I use in each body of work leads me to work in different ways. I will never subscribe to the notion that work in one media must be in the same style as in another media, although I do keep each of the three styles consistent. I paint my homeland in found ochres and natural pigments. I draw my iconic women pieces in charcoal. They are meant to portray beauty. I have a body of mixed media work that I am more and more involved in. I am evolving daily.
This is a dilemma - to produce an artist’s statement. I remember going to an exhibition years ago put on by an artist friend of mine, who had "artist statements" in such convoluted language that all the viewers were walking around making appropriate hand movements. So, let me just say. They are works for people to love as I love them. Whether they do or they don't love them, they will walk away with their own interpretation anyway. That is all an artist can ask. View my work. You decide.
