MIRROR MIRROR
FOREWORD by Estelle Lovatt McAlpine Miller: from the Dutch Golden Age to Hollywood’s Golden Age from Vermeer to the Wizard of Oz Just as you never forget your first love, you’ll never forget the first time you lay eyes on a McAlpine Miller painting. And yet, curiously, you won’t remember it in much detail, either. Each time you look at it you’ll see something new in its veiled multi-layers of paint. I do. Then, after viewing the artwork it’s all about ‘experiencing’ it. In the same way that you do a good book, or a film, returning to it again and again. The sheer quality, and quantity of digital media-like detail, in paint, is of today, as we have moved from the verbal to the pictorial. We see a catalogue of stock images, all day, as we run from our computer screen to tablet, cinema screen to mobile phone, smart watch to iPad. Wrapped up in new-media magic we go from one great virtual adventure to another. Flip-flopping between the virtual and the real. Since Warhol created digital art using his Commodore Amiga computer, McAlpine Miller’s captures his high-tech social-media look, in paint and, superfluously, by hand. Just as Turner made social and mechanical references to his time in his painting, of the Industrial Revolution and the steam train, so too McAlpine Miller paints about our time. The many different layers of paint provide the many different perspectives. Layers upon layers of a story just like a good novel. Every time you look at a McAlpine Miller it changes as you change and your point of reference changes; you see new things in it, which have always been there, but perhaps just haven’t been relevant to a particular stage of life. It will. In the meantime let’s go right back in time, to Vermeer. Women were the key subject in his artwork. Gazing out, wistfully, directly at you. They focus on household chores. These women are frozen in moments of time. Doing domestic duties from needlework to cooking, washing to minding children, gossiping and eavesdropping, playing music, reading and ... daydreaming. McAlpine Miller’s paintings remind me of a Dutch Golden Age Vermeer, as he too places the woman as key, central to the pictorial narrative. ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ , one of Vermeer’s masterworks, is not a simple portrait, it’s more a 17th century generic image. As McAlpine Miller makes clear, “Though some of my subjects are highly recognisable the others are designed as generic suggestions….someone you think you may recognise.” She is me, she is you. McAlpine Miller projects all the classical formulae of art techniques as an important issue in his repertoire, with much aesthetic value. The glow, inner radiance, coming from Vermeer’s women is what McAlpine Miller picks up, to become today’s Master of Light. The background is about light too. It was Gainsborough, for instance, who painted his landscape on to glass, and lit it from behind, in order to gain much luminosity. Even billboards nowadays are all video, the images are backlit, like your iPhone, with the brightness on high. And this is what McAlpine Miller realises in paint. He is highly structured when designing his background, which also doubles as his middle ground and foreground, highly crafting his richly decorated
4 | STUART McALPINE MILLER
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