Visions With Animals

In Melissa Miller's world, blind dogs have visions and monkeys clown around on stilts, and I like it. This Austin artist's vibrant narrative paintings make me want to climb onto the canvas so I, too, can frolic with dancing bears.

Okay, maybe I'm getting a little carried away, but that's easy to do when studying Miller's animal imagery and spiritual iconography. Her work has aroused lengthy multi-syllabic adjectives from critics: anthropomorphized, allegorical, and apocalyptic are a few of the doozies. These words -- which could just as easily describe a sci-fi flick (Planet of the Apes comes to mind) -- can make the meaning of her paintings a little murky. For me, Miller's work is like a kid's exciting-yet-frightening vision of what happens to her room when she leaves; the animals and colors come to life, and a fantasy-land holds sway until she returns.

Miller's paintings have always been replete with animals, though their roles have changed over the years. "There is a fine line of trying to keep [the animals] within their anatomical abil-ities, but with integrity and intelligence," Miller says. "I want them to carry a human narrative, while trying not to get too cartoonish."

Her early work in the Seventies usually portrayed animals within their natural environs, sometimes alongside human counterparts. Works such as "Big Chicken," "Small Dog," and "Mean Dog" are portraits of animals with their enemies, yet without any aggression implied.

In the early Eighties, her paintings took on a fantastic quality, with their compositions and narratives growing more complex. The animals became more humanlike, mismatched species mingled together, and humans disappeared. By this point, Miller had become a critical success, not only in Texas but in the unforgiving New York art market as well, and collectors and would-be collectors clamored for her work.

"I'm very fortunate and lucky," Miller says of her early success. "The art world goes in cycles. In the Seventies, it cycled around to expressive figurative work, and that's what I was doing."

As Miller grew older and her life grew more complex, her work again matured. By 1985, her paintings had acquired an even more ethereal and transcendental feel. She began to focus on internal struggle and transformational experiences; spirits, angels, and demons entered her paintings, and the animals began to look more garish and surreal. "Liar" features a creature with a rooster's body and a horse's head spewing roses all over a motley group of characters, some realistic, some grotesque. The work, she says, "expresses a reality of constant change."

By 1991, Miller had been featured in several solo exhibitions, with shows at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, and several New York gal-leries. Though the recognition was an artist's dream come true, Miller took it in stride. She continued to live in Austin and eschewed the frenetic lifestyle of the big-city art market.

Miller is known for being non-prolific -- she produces only about one new work per year -- which makes new collections all-too-rare. Her main market is Texas, mostly in Dallas and Houston, with their denser concentrations of big-spending art collectors. But her heart and her easel stay in Austin, as do a few works -- a few at Lyons Matrix and one in UT's Michener Collection. Though the Austin arts scene is still in its infancy compared with Dallas or Houston, Miller's attitude about our fledgling art market is decidedly optimistic.

"I think it's about to get very exciting," she says. "Austin is very sensitive to all the different contingencies that make up the city, and that's important. We just need to give it another five years." -- Cari Marshall