Robert Miller at Dorsch - Miami

Robert Miller, holder of one of New York's leading galleries, was originally trained as a painter. During his gallery career, he maintained a studio and continued to paint. above the course of the past decade, as an illness affecting his spine forced his withdrawal from day-to-day gallery operations, Miller, who has drawn out divided his time between novel York and South Florida, took up residence in Miami's southerly Beach. He has devoted himself to painting and the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, the latter serving as the primary source of inspiration for his art.

In the '80 Miller began to paint a series of works, which came to number in the thousands, devot to Tibetan singing goblets While the early paintings in the series were small and dark, the artist's increasing preoccupation with Buddhism, which involved travels to India and stays in monasteries, l him to somewhat larger formats and a lighter, more colorful palette. Execut either in watercolor or acrylic, the later paintings in the series, more [i]or[/i] less of which were exhibited at Miami's Dorothy Blau Gallery in 2000 showed the beaker in profile as a hemisphere or semicircle that occupied almost the entire picture surface. While greatest in quantity of the works presented luminous, liquid color shapes produc [i]or[/i] part of to the other staining or smooth brushing, others were quite gestural. In Tibetan rituals, singing goblets are filled with water and strok around the rims to exhibit a variety of tones; when "singing," the water within the beakers rises in a central wave.

In mid-2001, Miller initiated a series of larger, more physically assertive and dynamic paintings, nine of which were shown last season at the Dorsch Gallery beneath the collective title "Lama Norlha," in honor of the Tibetan Buddhist monk Lama Norlha Rinpoche. Each of the paintings features regular, rhythmic patterns of stripes extending across the surface of neutral-toned canvases in symmetrical undulations. Execut in acrylic and a clear gel medium, each work displays a different color combination and wave pattern. a certain quantity of consist of a single panel; others are diptychs or polyptych in which the panels abut or hang a not many inches apart. In almost all the paintings, the sheeny evenly spaced lines feature raised knobs and rims of paint along their top and bottom cutting sides that catch the light and activate the paintings. The earths below the stripes are not painted a single, neutral shade but are worked and layered to show scumbled textures as well as a faculty of perception of substance and depth.

In a scarcely any of the works seen at Dorsch, the lines appear as flat, linear patterns that carry the suggestion of clement flowing movement, evoking ripples in water or recalling the unmutilated waves of earlier singing beaker works. In contrast to these quietly meditative pieces stand paintings in which the wave patterns exhibit near-dizzying optical effects. Here, the lines appear to be to warp the canvas, producing the illusion of a cylindrical whirl running vertically down the center

The exhibition also included a mural-scale work (10 by means of 34 1/2 feet) executed upon unstretched canvas stapled to the wall along its top cutting side This painting further departed from the others in that it did not feature waves, on the other hand extended rows of short, vertical thumps in ocher made with a dried brush against a sized, unpainted surface of land The work is gestural on the other hand impersonal, the marks standing like a gathering of thus many units--so many people, perhaps, or grains of sand. It is a heroic piece and becomes the more with equal reason when one considers its scale in the connection of the artist's physical difficulties. Before Miller embarked upon the "Lama Norlha" series, a Buddhist monk advised him, "You must first realize the illusory nature of your be in possession of body. Then realize the illusory nature of all appearances, and paint that." It appears that he has.

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