Three articles out today about our new exhibit!

Groome with a View: 614 MAGAZINE

COLUMBUS ALIVE: Morris Jackson and Amber Groome

From the OTHER PAPER:  Dolls reveal artist’s hidden inner struggle

Patton, who had recently begun painting, decided to get serious about using his art to preserve his memories. Eventually, he produced more than 500 folk-art works that capture the events and traditions of daily life in Appalachian coal country between the first and second world wars.

The artist died in 1999, but his acrylic paintings live in the book Rix Mills Remembered: An Appalachian Boyhood, published posthumously in 2003.

Eighteen of those paintings will go on display on Friday in the Short North’s Lindsay Gallery.

Click to read the full article on The Columbus Dispatch’s web site. 

Linoleum lives on
Ex-painter uses flooring as groundwork for bright scenes
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Bill Mayr
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

To all the homeowners and landlords who sensibly covered their kitchen floors or any other room with linoleum: Bill Miller says thanks.

Miller, 44, of Silver Spring, Md., turns vintage linoleum into fine art. An exhibit of his work recently opened in the Short North?s Lindsay Gallery.

His pieces look like mosaics or collages or paintings, but they’re none of the above.

“The thing is, it’s all linoleum,” gallery owner Duff Lindsay said.

“When you’re at a distance, they look like lush, vintage oil paintings. Then, when you get up close, you see that the deft brushwork is really the skilled piecing together of linoleum.”

Lindsay represents a broad genre of folk artists, most of them self-taught, who work in wood, stone or paint.

Miller is his first linoleum artist. And he isn’t self-taught but has an associate’s degree in graphic arts from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

He began working with linoleum about 10 years ago.

“I was a painter living in Pittsburgh,” Miller said. “I started working with a group of artists making big sculptures in abandoned steel mills. We would go to abandoned sites, use whatever we could and make a big creature.

“That started my scavenging. I would see old linoleum and see how beautiful it was. I saw the gorgeous patterns. I’d find it in Dumpsters and save it.”

Miller uses up to 60 selections of linoleum for one work, cutting dozens of chunks and gluing them together on a board. His process of assemblage is similar to that of a mosaic.

The scene that emerges could be a self-portrait or a picture of Andy Warhol, Abraham Lincoln or Jesus. It might be a ship sailing across a storm-tossed sea or a bucolic landscape.

To create depth, he adds layers. In Kentucky Home, depicting a house and its yard, five layers of linoleum pieces overlap so that trees can be seen in front of the house.

The challenge, Miller said, is often to find a tiny piece of linoleum to complete an image.

“I’m taking a bit of the past and re-claiming it.”