Young artist with strong style debuts at PAFAC

Port Angeles Fine Arts Center opens the new year with “The Salvaged,” a solo exhibit by Michael Paul Miller.

It marks the Olympic Peninsula debut of the Wisconsin native who arrived in Port Angeles in September to assume an instructor’s position in Peninsula College’s expanding fine arts program. There Miller has taken on dual roles in the studio and in the lecture hall, balancing the practice of art with the history of art.

Miller’s paintings draw on his academic background earning his MFA at the University of Wisconsin and teaching at a number of Madison-area colleges. His monumental canvases are shaped by an acute awareness of past and contemporary masters. Absorbing lessons from modern American Realist painters such as Winslow Homer and Andrew Wyeth, Miller has honed his natural facility for capturing people and landscapes with convincing naturalism.

“His large canvases resemble Cinemascope freeze-frames projected on a screen so large that it pulls the viewer into the action,” said Jake Seniuk, the arts center director and exhibition curator. “Miller draws on a long lineage of history painting — those grandiose studio re-enactments of iconic events and characters that preceded the documentary records achieved with photographs and films. But his paintings seem more like clairvoyant snapshots of an uncertain future.”

“The Salvaged” is comprised of aggressively large canvases populated by a rag-tag fraternity of survivors who languish and loiter in dreadful dystopian scenes. Realistically rendered, people, objects and landscapes combine to hint at underlying narratives that spring from the aftermath of apocalyptic events.

Miller was born and raised in rural central Wisconsin. One of his enduring early memories is the burning of the fields by which farmers cleared the spent harvest and readied the land for a spring renewal.

The pall of smoke that hung over the vast open spaces of the heartland left a stale stench that lingers on in the air of these paintings.

The artist provides ample details and clues that are the elements of a narrative but he leaves the bulk of the action for the viewer to invent the events that have transpired or are yet to happen.

“Through controlled dynamic relationships among the elements of a painting,” said Seniuk, “the artist elevates form to symbol and shifts the viewer’s awareness from the physical to the mental. When painterly forms are locked into the language of Realism, as Miller’s are, everyday appearances take on a second nature as symbols and point to a more probing realization of what we are looking at.”

Figures in Miller’s tableaux inhabit charged landscapes and are presented head-on as environmental portraits of a kind, where the subject’s surroundings reflect his or her inner state, Seniuk said. Presenting environments that have been disturbed by man-made and/or natural violence, this 20-something artist taps the anxiety of his generation to create an atmosphere of controlled desperation, rife with intimations of unresolved dangers.

In “The Calling,” for example, Miller confronts the viewer with the image of a seemingly abandoned girl walking away from a house in flames.

With her hair upswept in a bun and her face fixed in a hardened glare, she looks prematurely aged as she advances along a crude road defined by the wide tread marks that a now-vanished truck left behind. The burning building over her shoulder stands isolated against a rolling landscape of wintry fields and smoke-choked sky. The waif’s faux-fur-trimmed coat hangs loosely on her with the allure of a womanhood she may yet grow into if she endures this current hijacking by fate. A frayed twist of anchor rope dangles from her right hand curled up against the cold, hidden within the broad cuffs of her pink coat.

“Miller infuses his renderings of the everyday with psychological timbres,” Seniuk said. “His dark and saturated palette yields subdued tones, well suited for conveying distressed atmospheres that evoke disaster, destruction, desolation. To salvage is a redemptive action, but it provides no means to save a person or a thing intact. Salvaging is really about saving the vital elements and then recycling and re-forming them into something or someone new. That necessitates a process of distillation and reduction, followed by rebuilding.”

According to Seniuk, Miller’s salvaged ones are emblematic of the dawning era of diminishment and retrenching, of restoring hope to a world whose spent resources and spiritual impotence will require new and leaner tools for coping. As in true history paintings, Miller’s scenes of burning fields and salvaged souls are records of a personal, social and environmental crucible in which new paradigms of survival are taking shape.