Artist, teacher Justin Henry Miller uses variety of materials to create unusual artwork

Although he may consider it somewhat of a cliche, local artist Justin Henry Miller said he has been drawing from a very young age.

"I feel like almost all artists partly say something along the lines of, 'I've been drawing ever since I was a kid,' or whatever, but that's probably some of my earliest memories, are making marks or drawing or doing something, probably on my parents' walls, to their dismay. But I was always engaged in some sort of making or drawing, doodling," he said.

Miller, who grew up on a horse farm in rural central Illinois, found art-making to be an escape and a way to use his imagination to pass the time.

Miller displays a piece of his artwork July 22 in a studio space at Southeast Missouri State University.Glenn Landberg

Starting out copying cartoons and comic-book figures, he eventually began to paint in college. As time progressed, he became increasingly passionate about painting and wanted to find a position that allowed him to continue to be creative.

Once he finished school, he taught at a small school in Indiana for five years. Eventually he came to teach at Southeast Missouri State University as an associate professor and the painting area head in the Department of Art and has been here for the past four years. He teaches all levels of painting and some drawing courses, and he began managing the art gallery at the River Campus last year.

Along with his teaching, he continues to paint consistently, using the studio in Southeast's Serena Building as his main workspace. Working in Serena also gives him access to the wood shop a floor below the studio, where he can build his own stretchers, panels and frames for his paintings.

"I like the building, too. I think it sort of fields -- I'm a painter, you know, I'm living in the 2-D world for the most part, so it's nice to do those 3-D constructive things; I like building things, too," Miller said.

Miller displays a piece of his artwork July 22 in a studio space at Southeast Missouri State University.Glenn Landberg

Miller enjoys seeing the process through from the beginning to the very end, from stretching his own canvas over a panel to priming the canvas to sanding it and making it smooth for painting.

"It's a lot of care from the beginning all the way to the end, when I frame it and varnish it and everything," he said.

Miller mainly works with acrylic and oil paints. Sometimes he adds other components, such as spray paint, for a certain effect. With such slick canvases, Miller typically has to paint everything on his pieces twice to reach his desired levels of opacity and color.

Along with his original paintings, Miller enjoys working with and adding otherworldly components, such as alien-type figures or other science fiction-related details, to "found" pieces, such as antique family or individual portraits.

Miller displays a piece of his artwork July 22 in a studio space at Southeast Missouri State University.Glenn Landberg

"These are fun because they happen a lot quicker, and I can kind of crank these out," he said. "When I'm feeling very drug down by a painting I've been working on for months, I can take a break and work on something like this, and it'll happen pretty quickly. It's also an opportunity to play around with some different materials."

These pieces allow him to "create new narratives" based on the photos' original components.

Artists associated with the pop-surrealism movement, otherwise known as "Lowbrow," such as Jeff Soto, Camille Rose Garcia, Mark Ryden and others, inspire Miller.

"I just think they have a lot of interesting ideas, and they create artwork that I think speaks to a pretty broad audience," he said.

On a broader spectrum, Miller draws inspiration from artists of all types, including writers and film directors such as Guillermo del Toro and Tim Burton.

Although Miller said he may have taken it for granted at the time, growing up on a horse farm gave him an up-close-and-personal seat to man's "use and manipulation of nature on a very firsthand basis," meaning he saw his father give horses shots of penicillin, conduct ultrasounds on pregnant mares and other processes of managing the animals, whether they be positive or negative.

"Those ideas sort of resonated with me, that sort of, man using nature and some of the repercussions sometimes," he said. "That led me to research more of what I like to say is like the closing trend between science fiction and science fact -- things that our parents' generation thought was science fiction are things that we're actually doing know."

A palette of paint rests next to the work station of Justin Miller on Friday.Glenn Landberg

Consider, for example, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, which took 277 attempts before success. In that same vein, Miller said people often are focused wholly on the end product, rather than the process and byproducts created along the way to that completed work.

"I was always interested, 'Well, what about the mess-ups? What about the screw-ups along the way?'" Miller said. "And that's sort of what I think about with a lot of my paintings, is the mess-ups or the place where all the trash is sort of accumulated, and now it's all been brought together to coexist or make this new thing, or try to survive in this new world."

More and more, Miller said, his work tends to focus on those possible mess-ups to paint pictures displaying cautionary tales, or a dystopian world that parallels ours or is ours 100 years in the future -- a place where reality has been twisted negatively because of decisions people are making today.

In the end, Miller said every painting has its own story, whether that's developed before painting begins during the creative process or even after the piece has been finished.

"I think that's one of the things I like about [painting], why I'm drawn to it, because it's not a math equation with a very determined end result -- it's wide open, and it always changes ... ," he said. "Once you get into it, the painting sort of talks to you and makes you think about things differently; it almost always changes once you get into it."

From Sept. 9 through Oct. 14, Miller will have pieces displayed in the "Level Up: The Art of Geek Culture" exhibit at the Edwardsville Arts Center in Edwardsville, Illinois. He also will have a joint exhibition with local artist Michael Baird throughout October at the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri's gallery in Cape Girardeau. He'll follow up that exhibit with a solo show this November in Chicago, which will be his first solo show there since 2010.

More of Miller's work can be viewed at zggallery.com/miller or justinhenrymiller.wordpress.com.

lyoung@semissourian.com

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