Terri Miller – 2020 Brinton 101

Born in Iowa just before the midpoint of the 20th Century, Terry Miller’s professional career as a fine artist began in 1990 after ten years of teaching in Special Education and previous to that, many years of involvement with industrial and architectural design in New York City.

During those years, he worked at honing the skills he was born with, as well as those refined in art school, by working in ‘off hours’ on drawings based upon many travels throughout the world and the North American continent. Seven trips through Africa, from the 70s through 2000, built up a huge reference file of sketches, photos and memories which he drew upon for the majority of studio work during his first ten years as a professional.

After a two year residency at an art museum just outside of New York City, he moved to Maryland in 2001 where new inspirations, brought about by exposure to the more domestic side of nature and the animal world, as observed in the hills and valleys of the central and western counties of the state, have become the basis for much of his current studio output.

Working exclusively in various grades of graphite, he continues to portray his personal experiences in the field through delicate line work and strong textural contrasts that predominate in his chosen black and white medium. Over the last decade, a number of his works have been spotlighted and included in the last nine volumes of North Light Books ongoing series, Strokes of Genius: The Best of Drawing. During the summer of 2008, the Woodson Art Museum honored Terry with a solo exhibition, Unknown Bridges, which included nearly 40 of his works based upon the more abstract nature of bridges and their structure juxtaposed with subjects from the animal world. In the fall of 2013, the Woodson also honored Terry and his graphite work by naming him as their 33rd Master Wildlife Artist. In 2015 his work earned him the Award for Monochromatic Work during that years’ edition of the David Shepherd Wildlife Artist of the Year competition held at the Mall Galleries in London. 

Terry continues to explore new possibilities and subject matter in his work, most recently by beginning to include the human form in his compositions, and offers his work through several galleries along the East Coast.

“My work has evolved over the years from abstract/expressionist painting in my teens and early twenties to the realism that now defines my output in pure graphite, in shades of black, white and gray. Though figurative in nature, I still see my work as expressing many attributes of abstraction in the way in which I compose my imagery. I try to focus upon the variation in textural aspects of the elements in my designs and by working in a monochromatic medium, I feel those textures become more dominant than they would in color rendition and, therefore, draw more attention to otherwise overlooked or underappreciated subject matter.

My primary subjects have always been from the animal kingdom and their relationship to their natural environments, but in recent years I find the juxtaposing of the human form as well as man-made objects to be equally as inspiring as well as to include more domesticated animal subjects.” Terry Miller