Ben Miller

Ben Miller is a Montana-based painter best known for his Endangered River series. He received a BFA in art from Washington State University in Seattle and spent 12 years teaching art before moving to Bozeman, Montana in 2016. He has spent the past seven years painting the endangered western rivers of Montana, Washington, Colorado and Wyoming, and more recently the rivers of Chicago, New Jersey, New York, and Miami.

The artist’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 began his Endangered Rivers series out of his deep passion for raising the awareness and importance of river preservation. The Endangered Rivers paintings, like the rivers themselves, are complex layers of color and transparency. Each work is created by thousands of singular casts with a fly rod – Miller calls this process Fly Cast Painting and calls the various shaped materials on the end of the rod Fly Brushes. In a sense, the paintings are made in reverse, with marks made on the back of a plexiglass panel. When turned around, the first strikes of paint represent surface reflections and whitewater rills. These highlights are then backed by successive color layers of deeper and darker forms. While his preparation is calculated, the execution must be spontaneous. He must first find the right spot, then read the river and the day. Miller’s stated goal for these works is to mark down the truth of a river, not something he thinks it should be. 

Miller’s profound relationship with his muse, the river, manifests work which builds upon historical movements including American wilderness painting, impressionism, abstract expressionism, and performance art. The artist becomes a conduit for the dynamism of the river, as he explores the complexity of representing a body of water up close. Here Miller challenges the perceived dichotomy between abstraction and figuration; creating paintings which are both abstract representations of the natural figurative world, and representational works of an inherently abstract subject.