Harland Miller

A title is seductive by design. Harland Miller’s work with text turns this truth into art. He began working with text as part of a series of paintings based on the book jackets associated with the literary genre commonly known in the USA as 'pulp fiction' and in the UK as 'tin pan alley' or 'penny dreadfuls.' The original paintings were in fact fairly painstaking reproductions of the dust covers he'd collected in the UK but it was after moving to Paris that these early appropriations developed into more personal formations or 'takes' on the idea of painting books or, put another way, books as a subject for paintings.