Harland Miller is ravenous. Following a morning swim, he has just ambled the few miles from the sea to his 16th-century cottage in Norfolk. Fat sizzles as he fries tomatoes, bacon and huge blue duck eggs in his outdoor kitchen. Swims are a regular feature of his days, but, he says, they aren’t without incident. Running his hand through his fulsome locks, leaning back as he flips the bacon, the 61-year-old artist says that earlier this year strong currents swept him off course and threw him against a groyne – injuring his groin. He invokes the faintest of smiles. It’s a fitting calamity for a master of wordplay. There must be a book title in there, somewhere.
Born in Yorkshire in 1964, Miller initially rose to recognition with his 2000 semi-autobiographical novel Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty, about a teenager who befriends a Bowie impersonator. But it’s his painterly takes on scaled-up book dust jackets, with their irreverent, humorous, sentimental and provocative titles – first begun in Paris in the 1990s and now a rich and varied library – that catalysed his trajectory. The so-called Bad Weather Paintings spring from the design of Pelican jackets and the drizzly mood of Yorkshire towns (titled variously Whitby – The Self Catering Years; or York, So Good They Named It Once). The Cuboids series plays with the self-help covers of the postwar years through colour-saturated shapes and existential titles (Must I Evolve?). The Letter Paintings draw on the fonts and style of medieval manuscripts.
