Juxtapoz
David Molesky
September 27, 2016
When I moved to New York City a few years back, I suspected that among the clusters of repurposed warehouses in North Brooklyn, there might exist the same type of camaraderie that has driven great art movements of the past. I had heard of a group of young painters developing figurative and narrative works that utilize the rich history of oil painting, and whose friendships intersected over studio visits and the casual sharing of secret techniques and inspirations.
My quest to find them was perhaps the quickest treasure hunt of all time. Upon inquiry, I was directed a mere two blocks from the L train, to a neighborhood sometimes referred to as East Williamsburg, Bushwick, or Morgantown, into a yellow-bricked, block-wide building, up a metal staircase and down a long Kubrickian hallway. And there, hiding in plain sight, was Adam Miller.
Adam’s studio, with every inch of its 14-foot walls covered in towering canvases, reminded me much more of vertiginous Manhattan than the desolate industrial surroundings of Bushwick. Adam’s paintings also contain a nearly unbelievable intertwinement of figures in condensed spaces, a quality rarely found in today’s narrative figurative revival. And he conveys historical events of the not-so-distant past as though they were timeless mythological tales. Perhaps this is because he has never hesitated to tune in and meet minds with the Old Masters, gathering inspiration and direction transcendent of the spatial and temporal world around him. In paintings by Rubens, for example, Adam found the Baroque spiral, a compositional technique that he has used to compose four hundred years of Quebec history for a 10 x 11-foot painting commission. This painting incorporates recent protest events at the base of the painting, which rise up to Quebecois political figures, and trails off into clouds containing Tiepolo-like images of the earliest settlers of the region.
I recently visited Adam and and his wife, Alexandra, at their home in bear country to catch up and stoke him into elegant rants.
David Molesky: When did your extensive and rich education as an artist begin?
Adam Miller: When I dropped out of high school at age 14. My father was cool about it, but my mother really freaked out. It took them six months to realize that I wasn’t going anymore. I stayed home to draw comics because I really wanted to be an illustrator. I stumbled upon the cast collection at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, which had many of the great Greek and Roman statues. Then I fell in love with Michelangelo’s work when I saw a calendar with images of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I knew this was it. I was reading gothic and medieval literature and John Ruskin, who inspired me to go outside to try and draw foliage as perfectly as Albrecht Durer. After that, I felt culturally unfit for high school.
I would take drawing and painting classes twice a week from a convicted bank robber. He had invented some interesting techniques with acrylic paint by carefully studying books in the prison library and experimenting on his own. He’d take big brushes and crosshatch on bed sheets to make canvas texture. He would say, “You gotta get your main lines on there in 30 seconds,” like some macho old cowboy. I already had the background in comics, anatomy and perspective, but he is the guy who introduced me to a lot more. I had started copying comic books and memorizing muscles when I was 11 and got into perspective drawing a little later. I was alone in my interests. I thought I knew everything, and when other artists would tell me to look at modern art, I’d tell them to go to hell.