eeing Dunhill’s new ad campaign didn’t make me want to buy luxury goods from London; it made me want a Miller. A Harland Miller. He’s the rather shabby fellow among the three fairly obscure Brits chosen as the brand’s new faces this season, the one trying to hide behind an $1,100 briefcase. That must be why I failed to recognize one of my favorite contemporary artists at first, but reading the fine print I found he was one and the same. The talented painter and author first caught my eye when his 2007 monograph International Lonely Guy landed on my desk. What he does best are atmospheric re-interpretations of classic Penguin paperback covers – and I know I’m not the only one around here with a fondness for those. The Penguin paintings often puncture pretensions and reveal home truths about the authors; thus D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers becomes Dirty Northern Bastard, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited becomes Gateshead Revisited, Hemingway’s sometimes forced machismo is summed up neatly in the work above. After painting a number of them starting in 2001 Miller tried his hand at other things, but returned to the fold with a new series of Penguin works just exhibited at an Amsterdam gallery. Stylish musical genius Jarvis Cocker probably picked up a couple; a big Miller fan and collector, he interviewed the artist for International Lonely Guy. Copies are available on Amazon, meanwhile here are some images from the book. Harland Miller was born in Yorkshire in 1964 and lives in London. He is both a writer and an artist, practising both roles over a peripatetic career in both Europe and America.
After living and exhibiting in New York, Berlin and New Orleans during the 80s and 90s, Miller achieved critical acclaim with his debut novel, Slow down Arthur, Stick to Thirty, (2000), the story of a kid who travels around northern England with a David Bowie impersonator. In the same year he published a small novella, First I was Afraid, I was Petrified, based on the true story of a female relative with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, discovered when Miller came across a box full of Polaroid images she had taken of the knobs of a cooker. In 2001 Miller produced a series of paintings based of the dust jackets of Penguin books. By combining the motif inherent in the Penguin book, Miller found a way to marry aspects of Pop Art, abstraction and figurative painting at once, with his writer’s love of text. The ensuing images are humorous, sardonic and nostalgic at the same time, while the painting style hints at the dog-eared, scuffed covers of the Penguin classics themselves. Miller continues to create work in this vein, expanding the book covers to include his own phrases, some hilarious and absurd, others with a lush melancholy. Miller was the Writer in Residence at the ICA for 2002 and over the course of his residence he programmed a number of events drawing from his experience in literature and fine art, which included a season devoted to the ongoing influence and legacy of Edgar Allen Poe.
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