Ben Miller - Endangered Rivers

Art Miami

December 3 - 8, 2024
Curated by Gary Snyder

Ben Miller – Endangered Rivers presents twelve paintings by Bozeman, Montana based artist Ben Miller. Over the last six years, Miller has developed an international reputation for his unique paintings of rivers painted with a fly rod. The Endangered Rivers paintings, like the rivers themselves, are complex layers of color and transparency built from thousands of cast strokes. Miller’s stated goal is to mark down the truth of a river and to raise awareness for the importance of river preservation. Miller’s passion for river conservation has led him to projects with the Gallatin River Task Force, Friends of the Chicago River, Hackensack River Keepers, Save Wild Trout, and others. Miller’s paintings presented at the Art Miami booth will include many of these works, along with more recent paintings of rivers in Montana and Washington. A recent exhibition at Oxbow Gallery Bozeman presented many of these recent river projects – information and video can be found at www.oxbowgallery.art.

In association with Art Miami, Mana Public Arts, and Pelican Harbor Seabird Station, Miller completed a residency over three days prior to the opening of the Art Miami fair. Casting with a fly-fishing rod well over 6,000 times, Miller constructed a work on a 4 x 8-foot, 1,000 pound block of plexiglass, reflecting his studies of the nearby Little River, a natural resource and historic site threatened by environmental stress and development priorities. This monumental work can be seen at the Art Miami Café, renamed The Little River Café. Proceeds from the sale of this work will benefit Pelican Harbor Seabird Station, Miami’s premier native wildlife hospital and education center.

I believe that Ben Miller is a powerful artistic force, different in significant ways from artists before him. He comes out of two important artistic traditions: American Wilderness painting and the breakthroughs of Jackson Pollock. He is positioned uniquely, to his credit, outside of a third - the dominant art world of today.

The American Wilderness tradition is perhaps best exemplified by Charlie Russell (1864 – 1926), also known as “the cowboy artist”, who painted over 2000 paintings of the American West. He was an advocate for Native American Indians, supporting the bid by landless Chippewa to have a reservation in Montana. Russell grew up in Missouri but moved to Montana at the age of 16 to work on a sheep ranch. Russell exemplified a love and reverence for the American West, and a working method of traveling into the wilderness for extended times. This love and reverence is shared by Ben, whether he is hunting, fishing, or painting.

Jackson Pollock has also been called a “cowboy artist”, in part because he was born in Cody, Wyoming, and from a photograph of him from 1927 with a rifle, in Western boots and a cowboy hat. But Ben’s relation to the Pollock tradition has more to do with Pollock’s ground-breaking choice to make drip paintings by flinging paint from brushes and sticks; partnering with gravity and ‘wildness’ to create art that made a clean break with the past. This was instrumental in ushering in the new movement of Abstract Expressionism. Ben arguably takes Pollock further with his use and expertise with a fly rod, coupled with the innovative creation of what he calls “fly brushes” – absorbent shaped materials that he attaches to the end of his line to create an extraordinary range of marks. Carefully studying his chosen river, the artist casts over two thousand times to make a 3 by 4 foot painting, and more when he paints large paintings – as large as 8 x 12 feet – in the studio. His innovative use of transparent plexiglass to paint on one side, in order to create a final work on the other, is groundbreaking.

Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock scholar writes about Ben Miller in relation to Pollock:

“When Jackson Pollock first exhibited his paintings, they sent out a palpable energy quite different from a traditional Renaissance painting.  Viewers were blown into another zone of consciousness.  We get this same feeling from Ben Miller’s work, which transfers our usual ideas about representation into a something different—a form of awareness that’s strangely abstract, mystical, and even a bit religious. In Ben Miller’s case, this is very much the product of the way he brings together two art forms that seemingly stand far apart:  fly-fishing and painting.  We tend to think of fly fishing as a sport, as a physical activity, although in fact, it has a mystical, shamanistic quality as well—and in fact this seems to be the thing that fishermen most prize even more than catching fish.  It’s an art form.  We tend to think of painting as a cerebral activity, and to forget that it’s also very physical, and that producing a sweeping, decisive brushstroke takes the same sort of mysterious athletic intelligence as to perfectly cast a fishing line, or to throw a baseball.”

Two aspects of Ben’s art are particularly fascinating. The casting motion that Ben uses with extraordinary expertise is itself a thing of beauty, an algorithm that feels not only universal – think of waves in the ocean, grain moved by the wind, the relaxed breathing of a master meditator – but is also supremely beautiful. Ben makes beauty with beauty. Second, Ben captures nature in time and space. The six hours in front of a river, cast after cast, is akin to a photograph – the river is captured but it also still runs free – the Pollock-like methodology creates a sense of all- over movement, allowing the viewer the heightened experience of the river itself.

Artists for time immemorial have shown us new ways to see the world. Ben’s eye looks out, not in. His mind is used to create tools to make art, not to be the subject of art. He is sophisticated, but also a populist; a fisherman and hunter who understands the world of prey and predator, who sees being human as also being animal.

Our world teeters on the brink of cataclysm from climate change, and human beings are more and more detached from nature and wilderness. The art world has pushed itself in to a corner of elitism, solipsism, and market manipulation. I believe Ben is on the cusp of Zeitgeist – and the cusp of Zeitgeist is the stuff great art is made of.

Gary Snyder

December, 2024