The Promise Painting

Michael Paul Miller is an emerging artist in the contemporary art world who originated from central Wisconsin and is now living in the Olympic Northwest of Washington. Since his first solo show in 2003, Miller's work has been exhibited in New York City, Seattle, the Museum of Wisconsin Art, Oregon's Coos Art Museum, and other notable locations throughout the nation. In 2009, his work was awarded, "Best Artwork" in the annual issue of Crosscurrents. Miller holds a Master of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Graphic Communications from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Academic Awards/Honors include the Edith L. Gilbertson Scholarship, the Chancellor's Merritt Award for art, and a faculty nomination for the 2006 Dedalus Foundation Grant. Miller's postmodern figurative paintings created under the label, The Salvaged, explore the sublimity of existence through a post-apocalyptic environment emblematic of death, disaster, and desolation, without abandoning subtle indications of hope and beauty. The imagery and subject matter allows for an open-ended inquiry of the bewildering human condition, and may address an extensive range of contemporary issues. Executive Art Director and Artist, Jake Seniuk writes: Michael Paul Miller's canvases continue the traditions of history painting with imagined scenes from a dystopian future spreading from the Heartland. Miller's salvaged ones are emblematic of our dawning era of diminishment and retrenching, ...whose spent resources will require new and leaner tools for coping. As in true history paintings, Miller's scenes of burning fields and salvaged souls are records of a personal, social and environmental crucible in which new paradigms of survival are taking shape. Currently, Miller works at his private studio located in Port Angeles, WA and teaches at Peninsula College as a tenured Associate Professor of Art. Previously he held art faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Carroll University, Carthage College, and Herzing College. Miller is represented by Pacini Lubel Gallery in Seattle, and by Denise Bibro Fine Art in New York City.