By Natalie Taylor
Keith Miller was born in Chatham-Kent, some 200 miles from Toronto, Canada. The town was one of the Underground Railway destinations for freedom-seeking slaves in the 19th century. Even as a boy, Keith enjoyed “making marks on paper,” drawing with colored pencils. In school he became known as “the art kid.” His parents encouraged his interest in art and when it was time to go to college, he enrolled at the College of Ontario, majoring in illustration, and then fine arts. The Art Gallery of Toronto, next to the college, became a perfect place to visit, and he immersed himself in the beauty of the fine art there.
Following college, Keith did a lot of international travel. He went to England, Spain, and Greece, and throughout these travels he kept sketchbooks with drawings and watercolors. These sketchbooks are filled with lovely scenes of the places he visited, each page worthy of being framed as an individual painting.
Keith returned to Canada, and taught painting at Sheridan College in Toronto. Less than a year later, he embarked on another journey. In the Canary Islands he got a job as a crew member on a tall ship, and taught art at sea for almost six months. He had a lot of time to practice his own art techniques, and filled many pages of his sketchbooks. When the ship laid anchor in Bergen, Norway, he boarded another ship that needed a crew member. They sailed from Lisbon to Philadelphia where he again could dedicate a lot of time to his art. During his trips Keith sent letters and postcards to friends, and to himself.
Correspondence art is an old practice which became popular in the 1960s. Picasso, Monet, and other artists have left many examples of mail art. The artist sends an often lavish artwork to friends, or to himself, and the correspondence bears the official stamp of the country from which it was sent.
Back at Sheridan College in Toronto, Keith read about San Miguel de Allende in a travel magazine.
Intrigued, he came to visit in 1985, stayed for three weeks, and took an art course at Instituto Allende. The pleasant memories of the town remained with him as he continued traveling, this time to South East Asia. He spent almost two years visiting Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Bali, once again filling his sketchbooks with drawings and watercolors of street scenes and landscapes. Many feature not only the native flora but also the fauna of the tropical settings. The feel of the Far East permeates those paintings, but the tones are mostly subdued. Instead of the brilliant colors of a tropical locale as one might expect, such as in the works of Gaugin, Keith’s works seem more reminiscent of the Tonalism artistic style of the late 1800s, like some of the works of James McNeill Whistler.
When Keith returned from his long Asian trip, he decided that it was time to find a different home base. He remembered fondly his visit to San Miguel de Allende, so in January of 1990 he moved here. Now, with a permanent place and a studio, he could expand into different painting mediums and techniques. He took up oils and started painting on larger canvases; in particular doing botanicals—grand paintings of orchids, tulips, and other flowers. He also enjoys painting trompe l’oeil, a fanciful way to fool the viewer into believing what he sees is three dimensional, when it is simply a masterful deception in two dimensions. A painting within what I thought was an antique frame, turned out to be nothing of the sort—everything, including the frame, was part of the painting itself. I asked permission to touch it, and once granted, I confirmed that the three dimensionality was pure illusion.
Watercolor sketchbooks, postal art, giant oils, and trompe l’oeil, are all part of the Keith Miller’s artistic repertoire. Shades of blues, greens, and grays appear to predominate in his works. In art, those tones have been associated with melancholy, and the longings of a poet’s soul, but they are also the colors of the ocean and the sky, and have a cool and calming effect. They say that to get someone’s attention you should not scream; speak softly and they will come closer to hear you. The paintings of Keith don’t shout at the viewer, instead, they entice with a whisper of color. For further information, visit his website: www.keithmillerart.com
Natalie Taylor: BA in English Lit and Journalism, Loyola University, Chicago, 1995. MFA in Creative Writing, Vermont College, Montpelier, VT, 1999. Published writer, editor, journalist. Spanish teacher in the US, English teacher in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Translator. www.natalietaylor.org Contact: tangonata@gmail.com
