Greg Miller: Here Comes the Sun

Caldwell Snyder Gallery presents “Here Comes The Sun”, an exhibition of recent paintings by Greg Miller. Vibrant, provocative, and intricately crafted, Greg Miller’s paintings are meditations on seduction. Drawing on a bank of classic American imagery from the 1950s and 60s, he blends motifs from the heyday of advertising, iconic West Coast landscapes, and alluring women into meticulously layered compositions that tap into collective American desires, fantasies and recollections. Miller’s pictures evoke nostalgia for an earlier era, but more than that, they explore the wistfulness that we have for a golden age that is perhaps itself a construction of ingenious advertising. No sooner does Miller’s art ensnare us than it prompts us to reflect upon our very desire to be transported.

Art Critic Peter Frank writes that Miller’s work “tells us a fair amount about nostalgia, accretion, and the persistence of memory, even when the memories that persist are only approximations … of the recaller’s actual experience.” He coats the surfaces of his canvases with surfboard resin, giving them a hard sheen that references Southern California car culture as well as the milieu of surfing. The collaged and painted images are sealed as if under glass, or in amber. Beneath this outer layer of resin, Miller’s surfaces are finely textured, built of multiple layers of pigment and paper, often distressed and scratched, as if to show the effect of passing years.

Born in Sacramento, Miller lived in California for many years before moving to New York. His work is included in the collections of the San Jose Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Art, the Charles Saatchi collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Pepperdine University, among others. Miller’s exhibitions include the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Malibu; The Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; The Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach; and numerous galleries.