Ben Miller "Fly Cast Paintings"

Gary Snyder Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new
paintings by Ben Miller at the Story Mill Pop-Up Gallery in Bozeman,
Montana. Ben has developed a unique style of painting which he calls
"Fly Cast Painting". The paintings in this exhibition primarily take
as subject matter the many rivers of Colorado and Montana.
This will be Ben Miller's second exhibition at Story Mill Pop-Up
Gallery. In the last year Ben's work has received national attention,
and a short film on his innovative paintings will be released in July.
Ben Miller celebrates, and intimately paints, rivers - the lifeblood
of our land. His paintings present the natural world as a place of
pilgrimage, discovery, inspiration, beauty and worship.
Without witnessing Ben paint a painting, it is almost impossible to
understand how they are made. He starts by setting up a homemade easel
on the banks of a river, upon which he places a sheet of transparent
plexiglass. Using traditional fly fishing rods, Ben substitutes
handmade "fly-brushes" for conventional hooked flies, saturates them
in acrylic paint, and casts from over twenty feet on to the
plexiglass. Over the course of a day, he casts over one thousand
times, the mark of each cast eventually making up a finished painting
of a chosen river.
As if the process wasn't amazing enough, one comes to realize that
Ben, in a sense, paints backwards – the actual finished painting is
the reverse of the paint covered transparent polycarbonate. Turned
around, the first strikes of the day are "on top" of the painting and
the last form the backdrop.
Ben Miller brings together two disparate cultures – fly fishing
culture and high art culture – each with much to learn from the other.
They breathe new life into an art world struggling to balance art and
nature on our rapidly changing and endangered planet.

Category: Arts | Visual Arts | Galleries / Art