On my sixth birthday I was given a set of twelve
pencils with a different colour at each end. The vivid quality of the colours was quite startling and even now, all these years on, I can still remember the excitement they aroused in me. Their arrival prompted my ‘Ancient Egyptian Phase ‘ . Frontality, Heiroglyphic pillars, pyramids and Ancient Egyptians were all that mattered. It must have been the desert yellow that started it. But whatever the reason, sand, asps, stripped towels, palm trees and pyramids, filled the pages of my drawing books until every one of those twelve pencils was all used up. That was a very sad day for me, because it also marked the demise of Joey my rubber clown hot water bottle. In a fit of peak Winky my brother’s crippled crow savaged Joey and pecked out his eyes. In between the tears,and wishing the foul bird dead, I put the sightless clown in a biscuit tin along with the pencil stumps and buried them in the garden.
However I soon found other things to occupy me. I started lighting fires behind the Velvet drapes in the Lounge. This was not an act of vandalism you understand, but more an attempt to re-enact the Teepee-style living of the American Plains Indians. Happily the Teepee phase was short lived and I was soon drawing again; anything to do with Red Indians. When I discovered my inability to draw horses that did not look like giant Alsation dogs I foresook the Plains Indians for the foot -padding Hurons and the backwood country of James Fenimore Cooper.
Then I got a set of poster paints in a cardboard box, eight pots of assorted colours with a real paintbrush. Up until this time I had suffered the indignities of globby school powder paint which you mixed and applied with mini yard brushes. For the first time I was able to paint with some degree of precision and I never looked back. After my problem with the Alsations, I determined there would be no more set backs where draughtsmanship was concerned. If I couldn’t draw it, I put a tree in front of it and have continued to do so ever since.

What is real? I remember someone, possibly the art historian Herbert Read, saying something to the effect that reality is not the four walls of the room we sit in nor the view through the window, but rather a stability of mind. If there was was more to this statement, if indeed it was ever uttered at all, then I have forgotten it and in the best tradition of the half remembered I court the confusion and move on.

I went to the cinema every Saturday afternoon with my mother, sometimes to see films she had helped dress. Bastions and heaps of every shape and configuration abounded there. Though I knew them all, in most cases to be little more than structures of canvas and wood, paper cut-outs or paintings on glass it mattered not a jot, I willingly filled them out with substance and imaginings all of my own. Cowboys, Knights Indians, soldiers in red coats they were all there, charging about on the silver screen and afterwards around my bedroom walls and across the ceiling, usually in hot pursuit of the fat, green faced magician from Sinbad the sailor, who frightened me a good deal more than the cannibal. my mind was a whirligig.

At the age of nine I was enrolled at the Mortbane Academy for Boys Invernesshire, a damp, grey granite pile, situated on the shores of a small black-water loch.
It was here, whilst under the influence and tutelage of Mr Beck the art master ( known affectionately as Old Dribble to those in his charge ) that I determined to become an artist . Beck was a spare-framed man with a livid pallor, spik0
y grey hair and the blushed nose of an inveterate drinker and every boy in the school thought the world of him.

I remember doing this wonderful oil painting of a sunset, a panorama on hardboard in orange, red and black, a subtle palette knife smear, sinking down behind a flat lamp black roof scape.
I thought it was very special, so did Mr Beck.
He put it up on a easel in front of the assemble art class and explained why.
He told us my picture, was without fear of contradiction, the worst painting ever produced in the entire history of art and would not be, in his opinion, bettered by anything in the near, or foreseeable future.

Every one cheered.

He told me, that my ability to create such an unerring visual obscenity was a portentous moment in both our lives, not to mention that of the class. He told me, bearing witness to this event was far far better than he deserved.
In what seemed a brighter vein, he then told me that the gap between failure and success was infinitesimal, so small as to be unmeasurable. “Twitch once Miller and your King of the Hea p. Twitch twice and you’re inconsolably lost.
Removing the picture from the easel he smiled at me and said “ Carry on and remember the twitch”.
I did and do frequently.
Working for the film director Ralph Bakshi in the mid seventies introduced a whole new dynamic into my work. When you have seen your images moving things are never quite the same again. I experienced a growing sense of frustration with still pictures and the strictures of the technical pen.
There was now a driving need to get as many images as possible down, in the shortest possible time. For this I needed new tools and a new set of references. Pencil, charcoal, oil sticks, paint, montage and anything else that made emphatic marks or provided an interesting surface upon which to work was now in the frame. The interplay of values in these gestural and empirically driven images, opened up a veritable cornucopia of new and engaging possibilities and in a stroke released me from the dreadful sense of inertia and suffocation which had been gradually creeping up on me. The symbiotic relationship that developed and now exists betweenThe two methods of working , i.e. the tight pen style, continues to excite and sustain me .

I have worked on the preproduction stage of several films which sadly never made it through to actual production. Had the flying machines I designed for one such casualty at Warner brothers ever got into production and flown from computer to silver screen, I suspect a slightly different set of imperatives might now be driving my enquiry.

Everything is driven by mood.
No matter how many times you use a particular technique or style of image making there should always be room to push back the boundaries and through experiment expand your awareness

I remembered as a five year old being totally enthralled by Grimm’s fairy tales, Straw Peter, a sepia engraving of the Denunciation of Christ , which hung on the wall above my bed, and the jam of engravings in the bound additions of Punch Magazine owned by my Father,
I am a great advocate of the eclectic process and the use of mixed media in image making, No artist should be unwillingly constrained by the appellation: painter, sculpture illustrator, designer etc. The constant search for new horizons, new and innovative vehicles and tools of expression, is implicit in the creative process and should never be impeded.
I am intrigued and fascinated by the speed values inherent in a visual composition, by its flow and direction. By speed value, I mean the speed at which the eye engages reacts and travels across around or through the picture: with the retention or mobility values peculiar to different colours, between a ragged line and a smooth one, a thick and a fat, a regular or amorphous shape, a smooth or textured one. Understanding and being able to manipulating these qualities, during the picture making process, or when constructing a three dimensional form, can mark the difference between creating something great and something very ordinary.
TED TAP

x

I took up etching in my first year at Art School and flirted on and off with the process for the next seven years of study. Needless to say I was wholly intrigued by the process but eternally frustrated by the difficulties of securing time on an etching press. The printing facilities at St Martin’s School of Art in the late sixties were by any measure insubstantial and always heavily over subscribed. This was a real shame because the staff and technicians were really very good.
In any event I came across one of my friends drawing with a rotring rapidograph and after trying one out myself, knew I’d stumbled on the solution to my problem. The drawing point of the technical pen, although different in so many ways from that of an etching needle, provided a precise substitute. Although every image was now an edition of one, it did allow me to create the type of line work I wanted and most importantly, when I wanted . This was a sheer joy. Admittedly the mono line quality of these pens imposed limitations but they were clean and efficient tools and I found I quickly compensated for any shortfall’s. In fact building up surfaces / veneers, was so much easier and so much faster that my image production quadrupled.
Laying down one pattern of lines on top of another for so many years in all manner of configurations and permutations was perhaps the perfect preparation for understanding and manipulating the levels feature in Photoshop. Some might say what about working a knitting machine and I would have to say “Yes but I prefer the former.”

1957 Manchester

Ian Miller © 2007
fragment: broken diary

 

My Aunty Minor had pestered my uncle Harry into buying her a sweet shop, so she would have something to do whilst he was away all week working in Blackpool.
They had no children of their own, just a ginger cat called Homeless.

My Mother was working at Kendal's in Manchester, so after school I went to my Aunts for tea.
Moss Side was very different from Chiswick and with my silly southern accent
I was viewed by the local kids as something of an oddity
but they were never unkind and I soon made some good friends.

My Mother had rented a flat in Whalley Range, which was two buses and a short walk away.
Once a week my Aunt would insist, despite my tearful protests, that I carry home a
pyrex bowl full of watery stew for my Mother’s supper.

Knowing my Mother hated it, only made things worse.
To prevent spillage my Aunt put a piece of grease proof paper over the top of the bowl and secured it with a rubber band. I tried to tell her this was no good but she never listened and by the time I reached the end of the street , the greasy mucus was seeping out and down the sides.

The first bus, took me as far as the Flea Pit cinema and I sat on one of the long seats, with the now slippery bowl cushioned in my lap. The jerky stop and start motion of the bus caused the stew to slop violently in the bowl and leak out big time. My grey woolly gloves soaked up most of the liquid but enough got through to form an oily slick down the front of my navy blue school raincoat. When I got off at the Flea Pit, the bowel was icky sticky and the contents much reduced.

The smell was dreadful.

Frightened I’d drop it, I clutched the bowl against my chest and queued for the 48. I was very conscious of people looking at me, but pretended not to notice. The second bus was no less jerky than the first and by the time I got off at Wood Road I was in a pretty sorry state.

The stew had reached my trousers.

My Mother, not long in from work, went berko and having got a grip on the bowl, poured what remained of the gluttonous mess straight down the sink. Sponging, soaking and a bath went some way to repairing the damage but I was not happy at the thought of a repeat performance the following week.

I think my Mother also realised something had to be done and whilst I lay soaking in the bath, she went out to phone my Aunt from the box on the corner. She didn’t look too pleased when she came back, but she said I wouldn’t have to do it again.

The following day my Aunty Minor told me I was a clumsy ungrateful child and should be ashamed of myself for causing so much trouble, not to mention wasting all that good food.

She said it was a sin.