Nick Miller at the New York Studio School

Nick Miller Ben Bulben Craggs with Birds 2008
oil on linen, 72 x 66 inches (183 x 168 cm). Courtesy Rubicon Gallery, Dublin

NEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL
OF DRAWING, PAINTING AND SCULPTURE
8 WEST 8TH ST. NEW YORK NY 10011 212 673 6466 FAX 212 777 0996

Nick Miller: Truckscapes, Paintings from a Mobile Studio,
opens at New York Studio School September 18
“Miller’s prickly, symphonic rectangles of line, tone and surface are startlingly,
visually alive” – Peter Plagens *
NEW YORK, July 2008 – This coming fall the New York Studio School will
present the debut New York exhibition of the renowned Irish artist Nick Miller,
opening September 18 and running through October 25. His “truckscapes,”
so-called because they are painted from a specially modified
telecommunications truck that serves as his mobile studio, respond to a
unique Irish landscape in a way that is at once compulsive in its heavily
worked detail and galvanizing in its gestural freedom.
London-born Miller lives and works in Co. Sligo, the rugged, picturesque
Yeats country in the north-west of Ireland. He conceives of his landscape
paintings as “portraits” of his surroundings rather than topographical or
atmospheric studies, and as exercises in intense dialogue between
observation and the act of making.
Miller has pursued interests in different traditional genres of representation,
including the figure, portraits, and still life, as well as landscape, adopting
modes of working in each case that seemed appropriate to his particular
interest. His desire to work from direct observation in all the weathers that
Ireland can throw at a plein air painter led to his custom modifying a
commercial truck, enabling him to take his improvised studio into the
landscape. The elevation of the truck afforded spectacular views over the
hedgerows and walls that would ordinarily obstruct a painter working at
ground level, while the safety of the truck enabled him to work at a scale
reserved for a studio, and prohibitive to someone working in the elements.
Nick Miller: Paintings from a Mobile Studio is accompanied by an illustrated
catalogue with an essay by David Cohen, Gallery Director at the New York
Studio School, who curated the exhibition. A comprehensive website,
www.nyss.org/nickmiller, includes the essays by Cohen and the 2007 essay
by Peter Plagens, and a video on the artist by Bill Maynes.
For further information and press images please contact David Cohen at 212
842 0212 or at dcohen@nyss.org. All works in the exhibition can be viewed
at http://www.nyss.org/nickmiller and are available for press use.
* Peter Plagens, “Nick Miller: Drawing Life from Landscape,” in Nick Miller: Truckscapes - Drawings from a mobile studio,
1998-2007, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, 2007