“I want my art to focus on the beauty of the world - the things we have around us that we often take for granted.”

“I want my paintings to look alive - so you feel you can step right into it and get lost.”

Ugly Ducklings Painter Jim Miller says his paintings go through many changes before they become swans. BY TERRI VANDERCOOK

Throughout his successful career as a commercial artist that has included four awards from The New York Society of Illustrators, oil painter Jim Miller says he always knew he would “someday be a fine artist ... I knew I wanted my own gallery and went from there. It's been 19 years now,” says Miller, owner of the third oldest gallery in Carmel. Works by Miller, who is listed in Who’s Who in Art, have been acquired by the White House, Wells Fargo Bank Corp., as well as corporate and private collections throughout Europe and Japan.

Miller has developed a painting style over the last 45 years which gives a sharp, yet atmospheric quality that is both realistic and dimensional.

“When you're working with oils or acrylics, everything has to be pre-planned. You have to know what you're going to do before; there's a lot of underpainting. I want to make the paintings feet alive,” says Miller. “You won't see anyone else painting like this. It’s on the labor intensive side. It takes a long time to produce each work. I'm also using the old masters’ techniques of glazing, which means [the viewer is] actually looking through several layers of paint.

“I'm the most different artist that you’ll ever see,” says Miller, who paints in his Carmel gallery. “I'm not a formula painter. I want to have fun with each piece, capturing something with each subject, each picture. Some of the scenes in the paintings don't really exist anywhere at all... [for example] When I see a fence I like, I paint it - then add a setting around it.

“Water is one of the hardest subjects to paint. You have to have a lot of intricate little details at work... It has to look shiny, translucent, your eye is very hard to fool. You look at water and your mind. knows what it looks like, but painting is a one dimensional plane. You have to get all the little nuances in the work to have your mind fooled into thinking, ‘Yeah, that's water. That has depth to it and it looks like it’s moving.’ ”

Miller says he works on only one painting at a time due to the metamorphosis that takes place during the process. ‘When you're painting naturalistically, realistically, you have to keep the momentum going [with only one work] because there’s a point where the paint actually will turn from paint into whatever you want it to - it's kind of a dramatic effect. I’ll be working with paint one minute, do some things to it and work with it and all of a sudden it becomes ,water.' It comes together and it is astounding. [The work] becomes more than what 1 put into the painting. I've always thought painting was a God-given talent and 1 think there's always a touch of His mastery in the work. I’m really amazed at the way the paintings turn out.”

Miller notes that his work isn’t super realistic. as he doesn’t paint every leaf on the tree. [My works] are impressionistically painted [using] a lot of little tiny dots. With that approach, the result is that when you step back and view the work, everything all falls into place and looks naturalistic, alive. [A paintings is] kind of like a swan,” says the artist. “It has to go through an ugly duckling stage - all the [painstaking details] are the transactional part - it has to be ugly first for it to be beautiful.”