Nance Miller

Sausalito, CA

The early psychologists taught us that everything we see and experience is altered by our emotions and personal experiences. The Impressionists taught us that the world we see and the colors within it are created by light bouncing off the receptors in our eyes. In this series I am merging these two ideas by exploring “seeing” and a sense of place through use of color, movement, and feeling. The marks and colors are all in response to their surroundings on the picture plane. As the dance begins, the narrative of the story begins to unfold and the sense of place deepens. The marks are the nouns and verbs, the colors are the adverbs and adjectives. “Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.” ~Phillip Guston

Nance Miller (born 1962, San Francisco, CA, United States)
After spending three decades working with children as an elementary school teacher, ten years running an international non-profit that conducts art exchanges with children around the world, and several summers at a monastery, Miller began her own art career. She attended art school in France and has returned to the states ready to infuse the beauty of a child’s eye and perspective, with a trained hand to express her deeply felt love and compassion for the world, and the environment around us.

Miller creates paintings and mixed media artworks. Through abstraction, Miller investigates the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects on the viewer, the dissolving of space between inside and outside, and the limits of what we see based on our beliefs of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is manifested to conjure the realms of our imagination.

Her paintings depict the permanence of landscape juxtaposed against the transience of the beauty around us. These works focus on concrete questions that determine our existence and our relationship with our environment. By exploring the concept of landscape in a nostalgic way, she creates intense personal moments by use of addition and subtraction, inclusion and exclusion, and acceptance and refusal, thusly luring the viewer round and round, deeper and deeper into the beauty of the world around us.

Her works often use very little recognizable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning can be shifted and possible interpretations become multifaceted. We live in a time when the environment is at risk. Miller hopes to foster a relationship between the viewer and landscape, inside and outside, self and other.