Godfrey Miller I have to thank my Australian friend Tony Seil that he more than four years ago told me about Godfrey Miller. For periods this artist has been an important subject on the Hugen website. It was quite especially the quotation below that caught my interest. "In confronting the works of Godfrey Miller we are not plunged
with Godfrey Miller: Madonna
Godfrey Miller 1893-1964 Madonna [1957-9] is one of a number of images of Madonnas which Miller made 1945-64 in which he used clear symbolism: the sphere surrounding the Madonna representing an aureole, diagonal bandings of line and colour representing divine rays, and the veiled moon emphasising her role as a mother. He showed the Madonna and child in an idealised relationship, with the mother enfolding the child in silent communion. Miller only hinted at the face of the Madonna in this work, and continued the image onto the edge of the cloth, as an extension of the work into space. The inscription suggests that this painting previously belonged to Donald Friend, who is known to have owned a number of works by Miller and also to have made pastiches of them. Godfrey Miller was born in Wellington, New Zealand on 20 August 1893. He studied architecture at the Otago School of Art and Design 1910-13 and at the Dunedin Technical School 1910-11. During the first world war he enlisted with the New Zealand Engineers and served on Gallipoli, where he was wounded in 1916. He moved to Melbourne in 1918 and began his career in painting, studying at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School from 1923-4. He travelled to London in 1929 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art 1929-30 and part-time from 1933-8. He returned to Sydney in 1938 and taught at the East Sydney Technical College from 1945 until his death. Miller was interested in theosophical colour theories, and colour as a circular flow held by blacks and whites. He portrayed simple subjects - still lifes, landscapes and the human figure, working with painstaking rigour, with geometric precision to create images with jewel-like surface and ethereal delicacy. He used ruled lines crossing the canvas to form a web-like grid, to suggest the endless possibilities of life, the wholeness of forms and their potential dissolution back to the elements. Miller died on 10 May 1964, aged 71. Reference: Deborah Edwards, Godfrey
Miller, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996. Madonna [1957-9] Charles
Nodrum Gallery presenting, by pictures and facts, a series of Miller's painting. Also a
biographie here, and a catalogue essay: 'The
Way We Were' - more than 43 Australien painters being presented, by pictures and
information, Miller nr 29 on the list: An
approach to Edna Jane McKenzie, who had Miller for her teacher, - and also about Hugen's
very first approach to Godfrey Miller:
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