International Lonely Guy

by Harland Miller, Ed Ruscha (Contributor), Sophie Fiennes (Contributor)

Harland Miller combines a painterly aesthetic with a literary mind and a uniquely gritty, north-of-England sense of humor. His bold, colorful, and tactile paintings reflect an original perspective on a rich heritage of pop art and there is D. H. Lawrence's Dirty Northern Bastard; Ernest Hemingway's 12 Rounds With God; and Miller's own guide to the glorious English coast, Ninety-Three Million Miles From the Sun. His paintings are at once impressive, funny, and touching, conveying a pervasive sense of nostalgia while playing with the ironies of rhetoric and reputation. Miller has been a celebrated part of the London art scene since the 1990s, alongside such artists as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Morris, and others. In essays and interviews with Jarvis Cocker and Gordon Burn, Miller identifies the influences of such figures as Ed Ruscha, Mark Rothko, Anselm Kiefer, and Robert Rauschenberg, all of whose work can be seen to have left a mark on Miller's textured and iconoclastic style.

Genres: Art

144 pages, Hardcover

First published June 5, 2007

Reviews

[Roger Gates · Rating 5 out of 5]

As soon as I came across Harland Miller's work while browsing on the internet (as usual), I knew I had to get some part of his work to own. Can't afford the actual artworks and he doesn't seem to have made it to AllPosters and their ilk quite yet, so this book (which I was lucky enough to find for a reasonable price on eBay - it now sells for around £250 on Amazon!) was the closest thing I could get. It's made up of interviews with the artist and full page colour reproductions of a lot of his best known work. For those unfamiliar with his oeuvre, he paints big canvases of totally fictitious, crazy Penguin paperbacks (among lots of other stuff), so you have rough, anarchic paintings of Penguin Classic covers of books called 'One Way Donkey Ride to Hell', 'Dirty Northern Bastard' by D.H.Lawrence, 'Rags to Polyester - My Story', 'Too Cool To Die; and plenty of others. A great gift for any art fan in your family (if you can find a cheap version, of course). A great book.