Rob Miller solo exhibition 'Northern Uplands'

The Northern Uplands of England form the nub of my practice. They are where I walk and sketch, write or sit and paint and generally hang out with the ‘sublime’. As I work, I try to feel the land on many levels both physical and spiritual.The immediacy of paint and its textures makes painting a great art form for doing this. From the start narrowing down a jumble of words that are running through my mind into broad brush and knife marks. Then there is the colour. Instinctively forming and reforming itself until it distils what’s appropriate into an ending. The next stage belongs to the viewer.

After painting for a few years I began to start working from a line of prose that I’d take from my sketchbook and pencil it on the support. After that things progressed and I tried to make each brush stroke act as a word and then each group of words a stanza. I loved doing this. For me it was making painting the same art form as writing a book or a prayer. Almost a meditation. But really, I got better results if I kept things simple and I started being me. This meant not shoehorning what I did into a style. So, I began to miss out the word stage from my process and just got the paint down before each thought had gone.
For me as a landscape painter the geography of a painting is important. My home ground is the West Pennine Moors and the South Pennines; my sketchbooks are full of it as are my small works. Most commissions, prints, larger works and projects I do are about Lake District and Yorkshire Dales. Most of all my painterly delight is making paintings of the Irish Sea’s East Coast from St Bees head to Lytham. It’s such a theatre of light