Times Square Winter/Looking North on Broadway, 2007

40 x 30 inches, oil & acrylic on panel

Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition with Judith S. Miller.   Miller’s new series of paintings extends her preoccupation with mark making and planar movement, even while she is creating an image that speaks of itself as a picture of “something.” When we look at a Miller we are immediately struck by the artist’s capture of a known reality. Her genius for affixing light, a sense of atmosphere, almost the temperature of the setting strikes the viewers eye and mind with a sense of surprise.

Drawing in close to the surface the artist’s obsession with mark becomes visible. Her delicate probing wriggles across the surface and what were perceived as solids break down into vibrant, dancing lines of color. Selecting any particular area of any of her works will give you a perfect small abstraction with a coolness that is only hers. This work is quiet yet artistic intensity enriches its vitality.

Approached from this view we come closer to what the artist is thinking about when she selects her subject.  Miller draws from the environment, whether it is nature au natural, or in this case the nature of the urban. She has a strong interest in diagonal composition and the ways that planes intersect and float across one another. This line of thought was first experimented with in the 1970’s using photography, collage and line in small works. A series of these pieces were exhibited in the 1975 Whitney Biennial.

The works in this show display an openly abstract quality, more than the art in her previous show held in this gallery in 2003. The artist has, in many cases, narrowed the angle or field of view and made a purposeful selection of areas. These are rendered correctly, but because of position she is able to present an abstract subject. Miller still leaves a trace element in the composition of each piece to ground it to the earth, a place we might know or recognize.

The paintings are accompanied by small mixed media pieces using ink, acrylic, pencil and oil paint on gessoed paper. These studies have a more robust quality than the delicacy of the major paintings. Also on display are a series of monotypes that fell between the last show and this show; light filled the monotypes display the abstract composition and are yet more readily recognizable as landscape.

More images in the exhibition