Painting remains a compelling, surprising, exciting departure and foray into the realm housed within a rectangle, a plane both concrete and yet outside of the world. The pursuit of the beautiful is fraught with exuberance and despair, along with those miraculous stretches or moments of ease like a breath. And that’s why you need art friends to check in with at times, peers and those on the museum walls, Giotto and onward.

How difficult it can be to simply see what is on the canvas; that peculiar phenomenon when you perceive the painting to have arrived only to walk away and return and realize it is entirely different and suddenly to get a glimpse again of what you thought it was. That perceptual glitch holds a message of transubstantiation, of faith, that indeed the mind’s eye did see a wholeness, a completeness. That it was and is possible.

Painting without a map is not easy. As a painter for over 50 years I have found a place to stand. A place to leap from. A ledge to crawl back on at times. The act of painting requires avid, vivid, rapt attention. Awareness of the moment in order to let go, to play, release, constrain, abandon, return and even to find humor. A discipline that allows for no false moves while allowing for the unexpected, the unintended, the unanticipated. I feel quite fortunate to be a painter.

Andy Miller