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Artist Profile: Sheila Miles
July 24, 2010
Dave
Glueckert finds the "Neighborhood" themes darker, more serious than her earlier work. Miles, he says, sees humor in the series, too. “Maybe they're not funny at all," says Miles, "but I laugh when I look at them." It's black humor. Courtesy of her mother, she says, who mended clothes for her six children, who could negotiate three conversations and a pile of dirty dishes all at the same time. "That's where I get a lot of the laughing at pain," says
Miles, "'cause my gosh, that's what my mother did."
It may not be polite to laugh when a woman in a red dress tumbles off a rooftop, "Off Balance," as the title of the painting announces. But those who can relate to a character navigating each rung of a ladder to be queen of the mountain, to conquer love, to calm domestic chaos, only to lose footing and fall, may crack a wry smile. Miles laughs without inhibition. The artist, who sometimes refers to painting as "scribbling" or "doodling," doesn't take herself too seriously. For months before the show, she was bedridden with an illness that sapped her strength and energy. In one breath, she says she started praying, and in another breath,
she says she would have prayed to earthworms.
At times the past winter Miles felt so exhausted that she didn't know whether she would wake up alive. She'd work anyway.
"I'd drag out of bed. Get in here [the studio]. Do a small painting and drag myself back."
Her uncooperative health inspired the pieces in "Neighborhood" that explore our
relationship with death. In "Dancing with Death," one woman wraps her arms around a skeleton. In a house next door, a man sits glued to the television. In another painting, death invades two homes in a neighborhood, and a woman slinks away, exposed to the world, yet free from the black hooded figures that want more than she is willing to give. Miles escaped, too. She kept her childlike wonder about her.
The zest in her spirit is evident in her movements. As she desribes her work, she almost dances back and forth, removing one painting from the wall, returning another, spinning for a cup of coffee. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Miles sat glued to the television watching the news. She needed something to do with her hands, so she began sculpting small dog heads. When she speaks of the palm-sized ceramic critters and how pleased she felt to
carry them around in her pocket, because, well, you can't carry around a painting, her cupped hands go to her heart, and she smiles. This radiant energy appears in the paintings, too. Sometimes pain is completely effaced by verve. A woman revels so exuberantly in a tub that the tub water splashes out the chimney top.
Whether funny or contemplative, the narratives take place at home, a recurring theme in Miles' artwork. When Miriam Sample, who helped fund "In the Neighborhood," first saw Miles' artwork about 15 years ago, Miles was an artist and single mother. Sample, who calls herself a friend of the arts, describes Miles work: "They all had to do with home. Home.
And how to raise this little boy."
Ossie Abrams became enchanted with Miles' artwork when she saw a painting of a red horse "furiously laughing." She and her husband, David Orser, have since purchased many of Miles' paintings. Abrams describes one, which hangs in their guest room. "It's a house, and it's when [Miles] was feeling terribly unsettled." The painting reflects security, says Abrams, which she says Miles hoped for in her future and hoped the painting would represent. "It feels like this house is just beckoning you to come on in."
It seems fitting that Abrams keeps 10 of Miles'
works in a room she calls "my mad room." Here, she says, she is free to turn somersaults if the spirit moves her.
'He watched her until the train swept around the curve beyond the roundhouse, and then sank back into his seat, muttering, "She had been running. Ah, she will run a long way; they cannot stop her."
Miles knows that her work-pace rivals the speed of light. In college, she learned to draw a nude - a realistic nude, toenails and all - in under seven minutes. Her days start at 5:30 a.m. When she counted the number of paintings she produced the last year - 120 - she astonished herself. Even sick, she had produced one painting every three days. Like
Tillie Olson pushing the iron back and forth, Miles worked and mothered simultaneously. It's her parenting side that her friend - and fan - Abrams says should not be overlooked.
She parented alone, and, says Abrams, "She has done a smashing job of it." Paris, her son, worked right alongside her, Miles says. At three years old, he had an attention span of three hours. "He was a big job," says Miles. "And a fun job."
It was when her own mother gave her a book of Paul Gauguin's work that she knew she wanted to be an artist.
She was 10 years old. In her Indiana hometown, she says, your subject matters were
supposed to be barns or horses or cows. In Gauguin's exotic work, she saw the
imagination unleashed. She perfected the mechanics of drawing-copying, she says, not art-by the time she was 14 or 15. And she did draw horses.
Now, the horses aren't copies. They're celestial horses, blue and handsome, they're war horses with yellow eyes, they're an incised horse named "Firestorm" that looks like the desert aflame, and a horse that even blindfolded runs like the wind. "[Horses are] a symbol of speed and power and passion and independence," she says. Her first encounters with the animals don't sound quite so elegant. She brushed a neighbor's donkeys when she was little, and he let her break a mule. "He trusted me, and I was tough," she says. "Plus, I was a tomboy."Her tough streak has served her well. When she was living in Billings, at one time, she was a consultant for the Deaconess Hospital, a panelist for the Montana Arts Council, a resident artist on the roster as a traveling artist and teacher, and she was
producing 10 shows each year. "I just always had four or five jobs going," she says.
A painting by Bill Stockton, whom she later met, had eased her apprehension
about moving to Montana. She wandered through the Yellowstone Art Museum, curious
about what life as an artist in Montana would mean. She encountered a painting of
Stockton's wife, and she liked what she saw. The date is seared into her mind: On April 19, 1979 and within two, maybe three days, Sheila Miles won the Missoula International Airport Commission, she sold three paintings to the Federal Reserve Bank Minneapolis, and she won the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship. The last was worth $20,000.
Friends, knowing she loved the city of Paris, asked if she was going to use
the money to travel there. "No," she says she told them, "I'm going to go buy underwear, and my first running shoes in five years."
Finally, she could spend most of her time doing the thing she loved most. "I live to paint, really. I lived for my son," she says. She rented a studio. She bought oil paints, which have toxins she had kept away from her home and child. She needed to paint in oils for her work to progress, Miles says, and she finds the medium romantic and voluptuous. Then she painted and painted and painted.
Though she has been an artist for 30 years, she doesn't charge as much for her
work as some believe she should. She's had people tell her that in New Mexico, artists in her league charge $5,000 for a painting for which she asks $2,500. She charges less because it means she may sell more, and then, of course, have more time to paint. She sees no sense in hoarding expensive paintings to only have to pick up a day job.
She feels fortunate that her work sells well, "thank God, knock on wood," because she never paints for the public. Miles received two masters degrees, one in painting and one in drawing. One professor told her, she says, "Don't ever think because your work sells that it's good." And, she says, the reverse is true, too. She paints what she likes. When Miles isn't painting, she is collecting material, feeding her muse, her subconscious that takes the reins when she puts the brush to canvas. The self-described news junky reads-The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Billings Gazette, the Missoulian. She is now reading Women who Run with the Wolves for the second time. It will serve her future work well. She wants to explore abstract, mythological themes.
"There's that tension of how far can I abstract it...and still have it function
as a composition," Miles says. But she isn't afraid of experimenting. She embraces it.
She'll stretch. As Glueckert says, "[Miles] is not compromising. She is ploughing
Ahead
- Keila Spzaller is a freelance writer from Missoula |
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