Remy Miller

Figures/Portraits

The struggle to learn to draw the figure well was an overarching concern during my undergraduate education.  In my junior year at UConn (the fourth of an inadvertent five-year plan) someone introduced me to the work of Egon Schiele.  "Struck by lightning", "Hit like a ton of bricks", all the cliches apply.  Angst, sex, weird psychological states and lines drawn like nobody else in history... he had it all.  As my friend Fred Burton says, "He is the ultimate young person's artist".  And, I was primed.  I have never hesitated to admit I did everything I could to learn to draw like him and imitate his work.  I took a lot of grief for it, too.  But, he was crucial for me.  It was only then that I thought maybe I could be a painter.

Over the years, other practitioners have superseded Schiele's influence and other ideas and subjects have taken precedence over the figure. I have returned to it sporadicly. People like Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Wayne Thiebaud, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Christopher Wilmarth, Gwen John, Eduard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Martin Johnson Heade, John Frederick Kensett, Ralph Albert Blakelock, Georges Michel, Patrick Henry Bruce, Augustus Vincent Tack, Euan Uglow, Frank Auerbach, Patrick George, Robert Ryman, Dorothea Rockburne and many others led me to where I am now. But, deep in the back of my mind, Schiele is always lurking.