Bay Area–based artist Woody Miller colors outside of the lines, having worked on everything from murals and corporate logos to travel paintings and t-shirt screen printing. He is inspired by the paradigm of a city and illustrates San Francisco street scenes. Since receiving his B.A. in Illustration from the Academy of Art in 2001, Woody has been selected in shows up and down the coast of California, including the city's STUDIO Gallery, Gallery Saratoga, and San Jose's Kaleid Gallery.

The wonder and mystery witnessed in the smashing together of humanity is what often draws one to the 'city'.  Each city, each village, every town, has it's own thumbprint created by the people who travel through and those who call it home.

Through painting, Woody's aim is to reflect the paradigm that is a city - the mingling and weaving together of various cultures, different bodies, all manner of food, beauty, style, and religions, to form a new identity. It is this coming together that creates a new city, with new character.

People often ask me if I like to do puzzles, or tell me I’d make a great dentist (based on the intricate poking, prodding, scraping and filling that I do in my work).  I used to feel that working on mosaics was a way to bring order to chaos, by rearranging a multitude of tiny pieces together to form cohesion.  Realistically, for me, it’s none of these things.  Rather, it’s the possibilities that can come from a variety of pieces and materials.  It both astonishes and entices my mind.  Something about discovering an unknown combination or design that doesn’t exist in the world, is intoxicating.  This is how I feel when I am creating mosaic art.

Mosaics are not a fluid art form; they don’t blend into one another like oil paints, or mold into figures with soft lines that gently curve.  They are rigid and abrupt and can be unforgiving.  However, it’s the adventure to create these illusions, with proper coaxing of the medium, which I find intriguing.  I work with ceramics, glass & stone, like a linguist when they are interpreting.  I feel like I’m giving a voice to materials in a new and expressive way so people can visually understand what the gathering of pieces have to say.

Born and raised in Twin Falls, Idaho, I am the son of educators and am descended from bankers, politicians, ranchers, farmers, business people, common people, proud people, matriarchs, Scots, and Basques.

Originally trained in Applied Mathematics, my professional life was primarily consumed with business operations, technology consulting, and software engineering, navigating startup companies and the Fortune 500.

I have written music, poetry, and screenplays. I attended Seattle Film Institute focusing on screenwriting in 2003/2004. Since July 2004, I am a husband; March 2006, a father; and November 2007, a painter of acrylics on canvas. In June of 2012, I transitioned to be a full-time working artist and (as of August 2012) an Alternative Energy Healer/Facilitator of Consciousness.

I relocated to California from Seattle in 2013 and have exhibited in numerous Seattle venues. I have had work on display at the Alki Arts Gallery since August of 2010 and have work showing at Alki Arts/Harbor Steps as well as in Meyer Wells, Seattle Design Center.

I was a contributing artist to the 2012 and 2013 Artist Trust Benefit Auctions. In addition, proceeds from my work have benefitted Deep Roots (deeproots.org), Alki Elementary School, DAWN (Domestic Abuse Women’s Network), PAVE (Partnerships for Action, Voices for Empowerment) and the Alzheimer’s Association. My art is in private collections in the northwest and beyond.

I experiment in abstract nature, figures, colors, concepts, and process. Thematically, I consistently explore the boundaries of reality. I am an artist for change.

ABOUT ME     

My background is fairly diverse. I grew up with a WWII veteran father who was a radio operator during the war. With the classic DIY mentality of that age, my father built everything he thought up and as soon as I could hold a soldering iron, I was right there with him, grinning, watching the sparks fly and smoke come out.

Growing up I would spend hours every day making stuff up to build. Hacking and circuit-bending old surplus gear to the threshold of destruction, building something that held no “valuable” purpose other to satisfy my curiosity. Sometimes just to make smoke come out.

While I never completed any formal engineering training (electrical or otherwise) I taught myself what I needed to know to become a sound engineer, build and repair musical instruments, amplifiers and musician’s egos. This led me from Oregon to California in the mid seventies where many musicians roamed in need of such services. Not long after moving to San Francisco I joined forces with a partner, built a rehearsal/recording studio and shortly after was back on the road mixing live sound and rebuilding what was broken the night before.

Late in the eighties to gain some “consistency” and to “be home more often”, I took a swing at a “real” job which became another real job and so on and so forth until 2009 when a corporate stooge finally rubbed my last nerve. I pulled the plug and went back to making stuff up. I went back to school to learn welding, sculpture, metal arts, AutoCAD, Solid Works and I’m still going whenever I can.

MY WORK

Life seems overly complicated to me. It can conjure up vague, formless images as placeholders for ideas I don’t fully understand or care about. The work I create can go in any direction fleshing out these placeholders using any medium that suits my needs or is within arm’s reach. I often make jewelry, or giant fire breathing sculptures, or sound emitting objects, or things which either wave at or whistle with the wind. Occasionally I will explore an idea in different forms from small sculptures to painting to jewelry. Other times I will make a piece one way, one time only because it has satisfied my curiosity.

For the past seven years I have developed two artistic styles, both dominated by a preoccupation with the virtual world of the screen. It started when I moved to San Francisco from France in 2006 and suddenly realized I was living in the very movie sets that had entertained my childhood. What were once imaginary backdrops of Hitchcock films now figured prominently in my trips to the store. It was a surreal and unsettling sensation that lead me to question the realities of virtual and real space. It was also at this same time that Facebook and social media spaces started taking hold of popular culture and redefined who and where we were as people. I found myself fascinated with the world as something we understand and live through screens and thus turned to my training as an academic painter to explain and explore these ideas.
    The first of my two styles focused on cinema and my aesthetic experience of it as a child. With a palette knife I reproduced scenes from VHS tapes that had affected me and questioned my relationship with them. It was both a study in these iconic moments that now overlapped into my new geography and an artistic meditation on what the screen actually looked like. Computers had already accustomed us to flat, high definition virtual worlds but the truth is that these scenes were filled with static and  imperfections. My work has pushed me to analyze the power of these memory images, how I see them in relationship to my current life and memories, and to question the overlap of the television screen and the world around me. Recently these questions have lead me to apply the moiré effect found in old television screens to reproduced images from my personal life and Californian culture.
    The second of my styles turned to the concept of the screen as a portal to our identity in the age of internet. I spent eighteen months in residence at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery painting over 180 portraits of people who contacted me through Facebook. I wanted to find a way to bridge my training as a portraitist with the concept of visual identity in a world that was becoming rapidly digital. In a day of excessive personal sharing and over exposure it was fascinating to realize how few of us actually consider our image as something outside of the digital screen space.
    As I continue to explore the concept of the screen and its implications on space and identity, I hope to expand my practice and discover new meaning in an increasingly virtual world through both traditional and modern painting techniques.

My one-of-a-kind prints are primarily about shape, texture, and color. I have been accused of creating monotypes so that I have an excuse to mix color. For me color is about feeling. Very subtly, color evokes emotions in me as I mix and apply the color, and also as I view the color. I believe my audience feels the color as well, almost as an aura that emanates from the print. My patterns, textures, and colors tend to come from external stimuli, while the shapes I create come more from long-internalized aesthetic influences. I grew up in an Eichler and lived amid works by Zeisel, Noguchi, Arp, and other "modernists," and these early influences have affected the stencil shapes I create. It is these shapes that especially imbue my prints with a quality that is both modern and retro. Many of my shapes are biomorphic, tactile, simple, sexy, human, funny—even vulnerable. I feel that we, as a society, reject feeling vulnerable; my imagery embraces vulnerability by creating awkward, funny shapes, and by incorporating the cast-off item. At the same time, because the imagery is nonrepresentational, it still appears modern (in the quaintness of the "modern" of yesterday). I consider my prints to be modern-retro—in other words, modern in the sense of the painting of the last two centuries. This retro quality makes the monotypes somewhat nostalgic—nostalgic for a modern era that was about the future but is now about the past.

Do you like the work of Monet, Rauschenberg, Turner? They’re all fabulous artists of course but you only get to view one artist and one style at a time! But what if you could combine them all at one go? That’s what collage allows me to do. I can pull images from  a wide variety of resources and styles, add additional images or textures in acrylic, pencil or ink and create my own vision. A final coat of varnish protects the work and gives it maturity.

I was born in Ireland and travel extensively.  This, combined with my background in architecture and graphics, is what influences my art the most.  I love ambiguity and the juxtapositioning of objects and images, many bearing little if any relationship to each other. I love seeing text on images – Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit – none of which I can read. With my own  personal twist I often include words or sayings in Irish in my work with the meaning reflected in the title of the piece in English. Working on small panels makes me focus my ideas and to ruthlessly eliminate material which does not work. My subject matter usually deals with the human emotions of love, fear, nostalgia, etc. – but also with the issues of the day – war, peace and justice.

I use wood panels as they are strong but light and can easily be sanded down to start from scratch when things go wrong – which happens rather a lot.

I am intrigued by the phenomenon of vanishing cultures, ancient architecture, marks of graffiti, light and space.  I create pattern, linear designs, shapes and forms into my own visual language, which is intuitively based.  I use what I refer to as “visual symbols”, sometimes literal, yet mystical.  I often write on the surfaces of my work and, by layering the paint, I can disguise any imagery altogether.  I make surfaces that resemble weathered walls, frescos, cracked plaster or cement, and the reaction of time on paint.  I view my work with a continual sense of discovery and enjoy the complexities of interpreting that sense.