There is more to Dawn Miller’s exhibition at the Center for Spiritual Care than meets the eye. Its themes are rustic farmhouse interiors and delicately lit seascapes, but the show’s title, “Touching Dust,” suggests that more than a superficial reading is required to appreciate the works – mostly in pastel – on display.
The title, says Miller, “comes from a quality of impermanence about the subject matter. It’s also about the physical touch of my hand on the support (the paper or canvas on which an artwork is executed).”
“Touching Dust” also suggests the act of returning to nature not only for aesthetic nourishment, but also for a spiritual reality check.
“After all, it’s what we all return to,” she muses.
Dust is not only in Miller’s thoughts, it’s also in her bloodline. Her father, Russell Miller, comes from a long line of carpenters in northern Virginia. The now-retired home builder’s business was in Annapolis, Maryland. Dawn and her six siblings were raised there.
“That’s my water thing,” Miller says, explaining that growing up on the Severn River made her partial to depicting bodies of water.
As a teenager Miller attended boarding school at Madeira School in McLean, Virginia.
An influential art teacher at this time was Marcia Myers, who taught art at the prep school. An abstract painter, Myers overlaid simple geometric compositions with scarified strata of pigment. The soft richness of her colors recalls the time-worn hues of Pompeiian wall paintings and Florentine frescoes.
Of her youthful aspiration, Miller says, “I wanted to be an artist, and took Advanced Placement art classes. But I decided not to go to college right away.”
Instead she went to Aspen, Colorado, to live the life of a 17-year-old ski bum. She financed the adventure by serving “espresso and crepes at a little place called Poppycock’s.”
In the meantime, her parents moved to Florida; she later joined them there.
Miller enrolled at Palm Beach Junior College and later transferred to Florida State, where she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology and crisis intervention. After working in the latter field for several years, Miller married and moved to Mississippi. There she and her husband (now divorced) were caretakers at Camp Hopewell, a Presbyterian conference center and retreat in Oxford.
Living on the 300-acre site, Miller tried her hand at homesteading and organic gardening. Her art career was still years in the future.
A few biology classes that Miller took at the nearby University of Mississippi eventually led to her master’s degree in the subject. Later, when she and her husband moved to Knoxville, Miller found a job at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her knowledge of scientific method came in handy when she was given the task of “chasing down radioactive containments” in a nearby river.
Miller later drew on her training in psychology when her position at Oak Ridge changed to communications facilitator. She later used her conflict resolution skills in the Knoxville court system.
“My life has always been that way,” she says of the turns her career has taken. “It keeps opening up into other new possibilities.”
Miller turned again to the good earth when she and her husband opened a perennial flower farm and a restaurant in Knoxville. Those enterprises lasted three years, during which time Miller gave birth to her son Jacob (now 24), and rekindled her desire to make art. Encouraged by the gift of a “huge box of pastels” from her mother, Miller began creating in that medium. Her infant son was her first model.
A short time later, a five-day workshop in Hilton Head, South Carolina, with master pastelist Doug Dawson strengthened Miller’s confidence in her abilities.
Moving to Indian River County in 2003, Miller jumped right into our art scene, taking an award in that year’s Art by the Sea with a marine painting. In the same year, Miller met Deb Gooch and Dorothy Hudson, fellow painters with whom she founded Gallery 14 in downtown Vero.
(Leaving the gallery after three years, Miller now represents herself. She also teaches pastel at the Vero Beach Museum of Art and oversees the museum’s program, Art for Health’s Sake.)
Miller’s love of water is evident in half of the pictures in “Touching Dust.” Her painting “Waiting” from 2008 is the earliest work in the current show, as well as the only one on canvas. Based on two rusty boat hulls stranded in a tidal creek near Charleston, South Carolina, the picture is notable for its high horizon line and foreground expanse of silty brown water. Several pastel paintings on view also deal with the subject of becalmed boats. The most recent one, “Maine Still,” depicts a tethered boat floating in a light-suffusing mist. “Sky” and “water” in the picture are separated only by the tenuous inclusion of a distant shoreline between them.
Miller says that the pared-down, atmospheric quality of that painting is “where I’m going.”
She adds, rhetorically, “How much can I distill so that it works – it still works? How can ‘color’ and ‘placement’ and ‘simple’ work together?”
Miller explored those questions in the pastel series of farmhouse interiors that she made immediately preceding “Maine Still.”
“Touching Dust” continues through April 29 at the Center for Spiritual Care, located at 1550 24th Avenue in Vero Beach.
