A title is seductive by design. Harland Miller’s work with text turns this truth into art. He began working with text as part of a series of paintings based on the book jackets associated with the literary genre commonly known in the USA as 'pulp fiction' and in the UK as 'tin pan alley' or 'penny dreadfuls.' The original paintings were in fact fairly painstaking reproductions of the dust covers he'd collected in the UK but it was after moving to Paris that these early appropriations developed into more personal formations or 'takes' on the idea of painting books or, put another way, books as...
Bio
Harland Miller (he/him) was born in Yorkshire, England in 1964. After years in New York, Paris, Berlin and New Orleans as a self-styled “international lonely guy” he now lives and works between London and Norfolk.
Writing
"I write all the time, even if I’m not trying to get anything published. I write because that feeds into my work… The text in my painting was culled from my writing. Writing was an unseen part of what I was doing.”
Penguin
As his Penguin series grew in popularity, Harland heard rumours that the publisher intended to sue him. To his surprise, he was invited to explore their archive and commissioned to create works for Penguin offices around the world.
