Harland Miller in front of his satirical painting, ‘Narcissist Seeks Similar.’
For an artist who has no qualms about emblazoning various four-letter words across his paintings, Harland Miller is surprisingly soft-spoken and understated in the rare interviews he gives. Usually speaking with his customary cigarette dangling from his mouth, the Yorkshire artist comes across as unassuming, thoughtful, and articulate, speaking with a rare eloquence about his affinity for words, images, and colour.
He rarely talks about his personal life, but the little that can be gleaned gives greater insight into his artistic work, and the dark humour, nostalgia, and hope that drive his paintings. Miller is best known for his enormous canvases and prints in the style of battered Penguin vintage book covers reimagined with his own amusing titles, the print versions tend to sell for between £10,000 and £50,000.
Miller’s irreverence and particular brand of deadpan British, Northern humour have proved incredibly popular, especially in the United Kingdom, and his prints account for 70% of his work sold at auction. But despite his popularity, it can still be hard to learn much about Harland Miller’s life. So, below are five things you may not have known about the artist.
He Is Also A Writer
Harland Miller first started his series of Penguin book covers after exploring his relationship with language in another form: the novel. Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty was published in 2000 but set in the North of England during the ‘80s, amidst a backdrop of New Wave, the Yorkshire Ripper, and Ziggy Hero, an eccentric David Bowie impersonator.
In the same year, he published his novella, First I was Afraid, I was Petrified, inspired by his discovery of a huge collection of Polaroids, each of which showed a gas cooker with all the knobs turned to ‘off.’ As well as being a study of obsessive compulsive disorder, it is novella full of wry humour and trademark Harland Miller wit.
Given that Miller is best known for his giant Penguin canvases, it’s hardly surprising that he has such an affinity with words, though he thinks of himself as an artist first and foremost. Yet many writers have inspired Harland Miller, and he’s also created canvases with fictional titles by real authors, including the hilariously-named I’m So Hard by Ernest Hemingway, and Dirty Northern Bastard by D.H. Lawrence.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For £73,000
The 2014 screenprint, This Is Where Its Fuckin At, was sold for £73,000 in July 2021 by Forum Auction. The second part of the text (“At Least It Used To Be”) is a wonderful example of the humour and nostalgia that imbue every Harland Miller piece, and the carefully-painted, tattered-looking dust jacket is a great illustration of Miller’s artistic style.
This Is Where Its Fuckin At sold by Forum Auctions in 2021
He Curated An Edgar Allan Poe Exhibition
The White Cube Hoxton Square exhibition was organised in 2008 in anticipation of the bicentenary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe. The exhibition, called You Dig the Tunnel, I’ll Hide the Soil, was curated by Harland Miller in collaboration with Irene Bradbury.
Miller has cited Poe as an early literary influence, having discovered the 19th century American writer whilst recovering from an operation in hospital as a child. Poe has remained a keen figure in Miller’s art ever since, and he’s even been featured in the artist’s Penguin covers as author to the entertaining, imagined title of Murder, We’ve All Done It.
Miller had an interesting approach to the exhibition, which involved sending out carefully-selected Poe stories to a variety of artists, then asking the artists to create pieces in response. A broad range of artworks in different media was brought together, created by over 30 artists in total, including Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and Harland Miller himself.
He’s Well-Travelled
After graduating from Chelsea School of Art with an MA in 1988, Miller travelled extensively throughout Europe and the United States, with spells in major cities like Paris, Berlin, New Orleans, and New York. This itinerant lifestyle exposed him to a number of different artists, styles, and techniques, and allowed him to delve further into explorations of Pop Art and Colour Field painting. The influence of artists like Ed Ruscha and Mark Rothko is clear to see in Miller’s work, both in the Penguin covers and in the so-called ‘Letter Paintings,’ a Pop Art-infused series which explores the effect of one short, standalone word on a vibrant background.
Yet although he is so well-travelled, Miller repeatedly returns to the idea of home in his paintings, with exhibitions such as York, So Good They Named It Once held in 2020 in his hometown. During a short film to advertise the forthcoming exhibition, he mused about people’s relationships with the place in which they grew up: “I think for the majority of people, they probably have a love-hate relationship with their hometown, and I think I do too. But just without the hate.”
This sense of place is very strong in Miller’s paintings, with the artist stating that “the more I travelled, the more I became defined by where I left.” This can be seen in pieces such as Whitby: The Self Catering Years, Scarborough: Have Faith in Cod, and Sandsend: Ninety Three Million Miles From The Sun.
Harland Miller exhibition in Los Angeles
He Is Fascinated By The Relationship Between Text And Colour
Vintage Penguin book covers were created in different colours, depending on the genre of the book; for instance, orange was for fiction, green was for crime, red was for drama, etcetera.
Harland Miller subverts this categorisation, and he often creates several different versions of his famous Penguin book covers (a good example being Who Cares Wins). Miller’s choice of colour is very important in his work because he believes it’s extremely important to how text is interpreted. He says “colour changes the way people read text”, with green, for instance denoting gravity, and pink implying levity. Miller says the cerise pink that he uses so frequently (for instance in Narcissist Seeks Similar) is “a colour that elicits a really strong response – it’s very immediate – like some primal flame being turned up inside.”
