Jeff Miller
“Whatever else you may say about his art, you can’t deny the purity of his line.” Some critic wrote that about Aubrey Beardsley, an early hero of mine. I’ve never known what “purity of line” means exactly, but it’s been a conscious ideal throughout all my art-making, and through all my stylistic modulations. 20 years ago I made a deliberate break. I abandoned the stylized line drawings that I’d always done –drawings which came from my imagination– and undertook to draw only from life. Still, whatever in life I was looking at, and it’s always been the human (and most often the masculine) face and form, I’ve remained fixed on MY idea of “purity of line.” As my style has evolved, growing less literally representational, I feel that I’m now circling back to a version of the highly stylized imaginative line drawing that I abandoned 20 years ago. My abiding interest in literal representation is now mostly expressed in my sculpture. And even in 3 dimensions, I work by looking for the line. Art teachers like to say, “There are no lines in nature” and this may be true. But, there certainly are lines in art.
