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Email PageStill Moments
May 28, 2008- June 21, 2008
Reception: June 7, 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Nancy Bea Miller
Sherry French Gallery
601 W 26th StPut a few pieces of fruit, a vase and some flowers on a table, and the French word for the result is a Nature morte—dead nature, literally. But when Nancy Bea Miller puts her brush to canvas, she depicts arrangements that are natural, honest, and Realist in more ways than just her style of painting. Whether it be a classical floral arrangement with a stray bonbon, or sumptuous looking doughnuts, each one of Miller’s paintings is a Still Life—her tomatoes roll off the table, her flowers wilt, and her crisp and springy color scheme shines with daylight.
There is nothing contrived about her compositions. In each one of Nancy Bea Miller’s works, a moment in a life is presented to the viewer, and much of the time that life is her own. “I am growing butternut squash this year because I read that they keep for months. If all goes to plan, I’ll be able to paint squash that I grew all winter and then eat it too. Sounds a bit cannibalistic, I suppose.” But it is just this frank simplicity that permeates her canvases, and is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of Miller’s art. Like her candies and her tomatoes, there is nothing but real humanity and nature in each and every tableau. She endows a human spirit and receptivity to her seemingly lifeless objects. In her painting Conversations with Teapots, the family of teapots and a sugar holder seem to be caught in a familiarly human situation; the parents face each other in the midst of conversation, while the small child stands caught in between.
“I feel we all carry a calm, still sense of place within us, and I suspect it is this place I am also describing in my work,” says the artist. Indeed Miller’s compositions do recall those blissful moments when, with nothing else on the mind, an individual can sit and just contemplate peacefully whatever is in front of her or him. Hers are snapshots of the minor details of the everyday, and in them Nancy Bea Miller has found beauty and life. These paintings, there is not a trace of nature morte; there is only joie de vivre. And indeed, she preserves the vibrant life of these perishable subjects through her work; their tight rendering and vibrant qualities endow them with an immortal life that fractures time.
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Sherry French Gallery was last updated: 2008-11-22
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