Eva Miller Review

Richard Birmingham
Sep 22
3 min read

Firstly, congratulations Eva, bravo on this current exhibition.

I’ve had the privilege of seeing Eva’s work evolve over many years. This current exhibition bears whiteness to years of investigation into the how and the why in creating a personal and authentic artistic voice.

Eva’s work has always had a solid foundation in drawing and the manual skills needed to make meaningful painting.

Neither slavishly realistic nor obscurely abstract, this current work navigates easily between observation, memory and imagination.

This is a thoughtful positioning given our postmodern era, where no particular style of painting takes primacy. Although this show might be described as abstract or semi abstract, there are many visual reminders throughout the work that tell us the artist has absorbed and processed visually, the world around her, in particular the landscape, and the figure, in its many and varied forms.

Expressive representation: Eva moves seamlessly between expressive representation and abstraction. The still life painting shows us not only the subject matter but the gestural mark making records the painting’s making. We see the influence here of early Kandinsky and more recently Grace Cossington-Smith. Eva repeats these staccato brush-strokes activating the surface and culminating in a precise but spontaneous composition. Like bricks in a wall, rhythmic dabs build to form a tightly knit matrix, completing the work. This technique then crosses over to buttress the more challenging abstract work.

We still see the semi-pointillist technique but the literal subject and the colour is dialed down. The colour is still there but veiled, pushed back into the fictional space, perhaps to reference to an earlier time in the paintings history. We now observe a condensed and layered visual language existing in a non-perspectival, flattened picture space.

We see glyphs and symbols in place of people and places, embodied within mark and symbol. A new language is forged, where paint, colour and mark express remembered places, feelings, and mind states.

Art School

The overriding teaching during art school was to make authentic work, to drill down below the facile and the clichés to uncover a true voice. A quest shared by writers and actors.

This journey inevitably involved acknowledging art of the past whilst engaging fully with the current artistic zeitgeist. No easy task, for painters it usually involved a trade-off between realism and abstraction.

One way of achieving this was the invention of signs and symbols to substitute for real people, places and objects. A poetic equivalent if you will, to express life experience. I feel this description goes a long way in helping us understand the breadth and life in Eva’s painting.

I was impressed when I saw this exhibition coming together a year or so ago. Then as now the works show a blending of many interests and a continued belief in the expressive qualities of paint on canvas.

This exhibition demonstrates an artist in command of technique and vision, honed over many years.

A few more thoughts on Eva’s work: Abstraction in painting shares an affinity with poetry, both function to evoke feeling and both extend the language of expression beyond a narrative purpose. It’s in that spirit I’ve put together a few lines to reflect my response to Eva’s work.

Eva’s painting

A poetic state of mind expands meaning

Where invented forms, show a myriad of possibilities

Her veiled language, distilled in diffuse colour

Reveals a landscape re-imagined,

Remembered walks with friends, painted in aerial perspective

With constructed memory shapes in a moving tableau,

Here time and space are layered with a knowing brush

A beginning, a middle, a continuum

Distilled language honed, unfolding and immediate

Woven yellow angels in a landscape re born

Many streams, stitched together with a dexterous hand