Artwork
Biography
Born in Yorkshire in 1964, Harland Miller is both a writer and an artist, practising both roles over a peripatetic career in both Europe and America.
Miller published his first novel ‘Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty’ to critical acclaim in 2000. In 2001, Miller produced a series of paintings based of the dust jackets of Penguin books. By combining the motif inherent in the Penguin book, Miller found a way to marry aspects of Pop Art, abstraction and figurative painting at once, with his writer’s love of text. The ensuing images are humorous, sardonic and nostalgic at the same time, while the painting style hints at the dog-eared, scuffed covers of the Penguin classics themselves. Miller continues to create work in this vein, expanding the book covers to include his own phrases, some hilarious and absurd, others with a lush melancholy.
His most successful auction results include the sale of George Michael’s painting ‘Incurable Romantic…’ which sold at Christies in March 2019 for £237,500, and his limited edition prints have sold for up to £80,000. His work is exhibited in numerous international museums and galleries and is collected by Elton John, Stephen Fry, Ed Sheeran, Jarvis Cocker, Rachel Weisz, Brooklyn Decker and Damien Hirst amongst others.
The Telegraph describe Miller as an “It guy’, a mini-legend in his own extremely laidback lunchtime,” and fellow artist Max Wigram said “Harland never follows fashion, fashion has followed him. He’s always had the same style.”
Miller’s largest exhibition to date opened at York Art Gallery in 2020, which was a homecoming exhibition for the arist. The display included more than thirty artworks, which explore Miller’s formative years growing up in Yorkshire in the 1970s.
Banner image credit: Charlotte Graham
