Remy Miller, Scott’s Creek, 25 May 2023; Gouache/charcoal on paper, Courtesy of the artist.
In nearly every introduction to drawing class, the instructor tells the students to draw using their eyes, not their brains. It’s a matter of depicting what you see, not what you think you should see. As a practice, it pushes the artist to sit in prolonged observation, to study the shapes and lines that make up a subject, their proportions and relation to a space. It’s a process, a skill to be learned and honed.
Of course, the same could be said for visual arts writ large. So says artist and professor Remy Miller: “What I know is that art-making — drawings, paintings, sculpture, whatever you’re going to do — is a learned thing. I don’t believe much in talent, and I don’t care about it. It’s not mysterious. It’s not something that comes down from above and you get it and other people don’t. If you want it, if it’s something you care about, you can learn to do what you do.”
Formerly a dean at the now-closed Memphis College of Art and today an instructor at East Arkansas Community College, Miller has taught art in some capacity since 1984. During his tenure at MCA, he hired Joe Morzuch to teach drawing and later painting. “He was kind of a linchpin person who was great at getting people together,” Miller says of his friend and peer. “And both Joe and I believe that if [art-marking] was an inherent gift from somewhere, then you wouldn’t have any reason to go to art school.”
Yet, the two agree that learning doesn’t end in art school, nor is it linear. “You make one painting,” Miller says, “and maybe there’s something that you are excited about or happy with and that painting prompts you to make something else. Or you make a painting and it falls short and so you think, I’m going to nail the next one. And so, one painting leads to another painting and it’s just a really slow kind of investigation. The more I do it, the more there is to discover.”
“When I went to [undergrad], it was a huge learning curve. I enjoyed it, and continued it. I didn’t know if I was any good at it, but I could see that I could learn, I could get better. It was probably two or three years before I really thought, maybe I can do this. And so it was not until, I think, probably my junior year that I really decided I can paint.” — Remy Miller
That constant investigation — the urge to observe, experiment, and improve — reveals itself both in the process and in the final product. “Painting is a way of marking time,” Miller writes in his artist statement. “Time is the aggregate of painting.” To that point, the artists’ latest collaboration — a joint exhibition at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens titled “Marking Time” — seems fitting as it puts these two friends’ works into counterpoint, their paintings a record of their labors.
The exhibit, which opened in January and will be on display through April 14th, features Miller’s inky landscapes of Scott’s Creek in Lakeland and Morzuch’s impasto still-lifes of ordinary objects and self-portraits. Through their different representational aesthetics, the pair embrace the painterly, effortful aspects of their medium, forgoing any attempts for photorealism and opting instead for strokes, blotches, and scrapes of paint that leave evidence of their hands. With neither of the artists illustrating grand narratives, both favoring ordinary and unassuming subjects, their goal is to uplift the present moment’s mundanity through their artistic endeavors.
Before college, Miller, who grew up in the Northeast, had little exposure to visual art. “We moved around a bit,” he says. “And so I went to three different high schools, and I had one art class just for a semester in my junior year of high school. And that was it. I didn’t draw regularly. It just wasn’t an activity that I did on a regular basis. I was pretty directionless as a kid.”
He goes on to say, “The first year that I was in college, I took a couple of art history classes, and that certainly had some bearing on the idea of going to art school. But I really just learned how to be a student the first year in college — I didn’t have any particular focus. I just knew I wasn’t going to stay at that school. I was going to transfer to the University of Connecticut. And so I can’t say that I made any real decision. I had no business applying to an art college. I don’t know if this is the thing to say in an interview, but the reason I went to art school was because my girlfriend at the time and her mother thought that I made nice Christmas cards.”
Though Miller speaks warily of his younger self, he clearly made an impression in the admissions process and was accepted, eventually earning his BFA in painting at the University of Connecticut and later his MFA at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
“When I went to [undergrad], it was a huge learning curve,” Miller admits. “I enjoyed it, and continued it. I didn’t know if I was any good at it, but I could see that I could learn, I could get better. It was probably two or three years before I really thought, maybe I can do this. And so it was not until, I think, probably my junior year that I really decided I can paint.”
Joe Morzuch, Garbage Bags with Flags and Plastic Netting, 2017-2020; Oil on canvas on panel; Courtesy of the artist.
On the other hand, Morzuch always knew he was going to be an artist. “I don’t know if it was ever a plan or anything,” he says. “It was just something I always did. I’ve always drawn. I grew up just north of Chicago, and would go to the Art Institute a lot, so even as a kid I was going to a major museum and surrounded by art. I could find art when I wanted it.
“It probably became really clear in high school,” he says. “I had some great teachers in high school, and that’s when I probably started to think, this is something that I can do for the rest of my life.”
Morzuch earned his BFA from Western Illinois University in painting and drawing in 2002 and his MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 2006. Like Miller, Morzuch has spent most of his professional career teaching in colleges, presently as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University.
“I like the challenge of trying to see beauty in the everyday or in the overlooked, but more so I think it’s the challenge of making a painting of things that we see every day that is compelling, interesting, and maybe a little mysterious.” — Joe Morzuch
Even with their divergent backgrounds — one, a once-hesitant artist; the other, almost instinctual in his identity — both echo a natural pull to painting as their choice of medium. “The most beautiful things I’ve seen have been paintings,” Morzuch says. “I’ve always seen beauty in paintings and thought of that as a really interesting, worthwhile struggle. … I think for both of us it begins with looking.”
For Morzuch, that means observing the ordinary, his choice subject for his still-lifes. Chairs, step ladders, garbage bags with flags and plastic netting — these are the objects that entrance the artist. “I like the challenge of trying to see beauty in the everyday or in the overlooked,” he says, “but more so I think it’s the challenge of making a painting of things that we see every day that is compelling, interesting, and maybe a little mysterious. How can I look at something that I’ve seen every day for years and really examine that thing? How can I connect to it in a way that seems new or fresh? I’m always trying to balance what I’m seeing objectively with what I’m feeling about it.”
He adds, “I was raised Catholic. There is a certain reverence for objects metaphorically and I’m sure that is in my background. So sometimes the kind of tabletop is almost sort of like an altar in that regard. But I think more than that, the table is a surface, it’s a site for gathering, it’s a domestic object. So the table represents metaphorically — in a very sort of mundane way, but also in maybe a more elevated, associative kind of way — the time that’s invested in the work you know — the looking, the analyzing and representing.”
For each painting, Morzuch spends time arranging the objects methodically, taking measurements and working with plumb lines and proportional dividers to guide his technique. Even with such precise preparations, his process, he says, is one of consistent revision, as he often reworks the paint on the canvas.
“I might start a painting with a kind of initial idea, but that always changes,” he says, “and once the painting starts to develop, it becomes something else — hopefully something better than the initial idea, and that revision adds up and creates a surface that I think maybe has a richness or a density about it.”
If he needs to adjust an object, move it slightly, he records it in the painting, the effect almost like a subtle collage of ephemeral scenes. There’s a hushed quality in his work. The colors are muted, and the composition, even with sharp lines and rough strokes, retains a certain softness.
“I want there to be a kind of stillness,” Morzuch says of his work, “and maybe an opportunity for contemplation. I don’t want the paintings to be an easy read. I am looking to always balance opposites in a way. I definitely don’t think of myself as a realist painter, but I’m not an abstract painter. I want to be somewhere in the middle. I want there to be a kind of tension.”
In a similar fashion, Miller often invokes Richard Diebenkorn’s idea of “rightness” in his own landscapes, the goal being to strive not for accuracy in depicting a subject but for visual harmony. “It’s not like it’s a photorealistic thing,” he says. “I’m not trying to imitate every vein in every leaf or anything like that. It’s more when I’m looking for images, I react to what I think would make an interesting composition and range, and that’s what I’m looking for.”
Right now, what Miller finds most interesting is the transparency of water. “How to make that illusion happen is really a big part of it because something about that drives me crazy. I just love that.”
Last year, when Miller began creating the landscapes of Scott’s Creek featured in the Dixon show, it reminded him of his childhood days spent in Horseheads, New York, where he played in a stream. “I never thought about it in a direct sort of way but that experience, being able to go to this stream, was something that I loved as a kid. If I knew what I knew now, as an 8-year-old kid, I would have made these paintings then, but I don’t think of these paintings as nostalgic. It’s just something that I found interesting as a kid and I find it interesting now. And now I know enough to take on the challenge of making the things that I’m making now.”
For his paintings, Miller often portrays unassuming perspectives of the creek, offering only pockets of what the natural beauty offers as if in a tease. He works in gouache, charcoal, and pastel, shaping the water’s delicate features from bold strokes and saturated colors that bleed into one another. The effect is whimsical, almost storybook.
“I am not the type of person that sits around and thinks, how can I do something that’s original?” he says. “That is a simplistic way of looking at things. You do what you like; you do what you believe in. You take on the subjects that you think are interesting that you know, that drive or in some way are important and you hope that other people will see it. And if they don’t, it’s my fault. It’s not their fault.”
For both artists, time is a central facet to their bodies of work. Their artistic processes time-consuming: each layers paint to create almost sculptural pieces, Moreover, their choices of still-lifes and landscapes by nature are about time.
“Still-life as a genre, and the history of the still-life, has always been embedded in a reminder of mortality and time — think of rotting fruit or flowers in full bloom,” Morzuch says. “A landscape never looks the same from minute to minute, so that definitely is a point of the time.”
But the reflection on time doesn’t exist for the artists alone — it’s a call for the viewer to join in, to reflect on the marks of time with the artists, to take in the work before them, celebrating the mundane. It’s a call to see what’s there — and not what they think should be there.
“Remy Miller and Joe Morzuch: Marking Time” is on display at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens until April 14th. Its run coincides with “Breaking the Rules: Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown,” on display until March 31st.
