Miles Bair - Katie Gingrass Gallery

Miles Bair - acrylic painting and silver & gold leaf

Miles Bair:
“Today landscape painting is often thought of as safe painting-hopelessly romantic painting, something more appropriate to the 19th century. For me, the tradition provides a wonderful structure to work within and attempt to expand. I think of my painting as an exploration of the relation between nature and culture. Far from being passe, this relationship between humankind and the natural world is increasingly becoming the central concern of our time.”

Miles Bair’s painted juxtapositions convey the temporal coexistence of cultural edifice and nature in both the real and the imagined world. He directs us to the ethereal beauty of natural spaces. Bair’s paintings have a highly resolved, handmade quality dot patterns emerge. The dots, or more accurately small paint strokes, do not reference the pixel or digital processes; the dots simultaneously create illusions of solidity and space while breaking down the painting surface into a series of small marks. Large areas of gold or silver gilding evoke Japanese Kano and Rimpa screen paintings. These gilded passages suggest a balance of orders and metaphorical meanings while integrating an architectural sensibility into the paintings. Bair frequently visits and works in Japan where nature and culture are often intertwined. In Japan, gardening is a centuries-old high art. In Bair’s work, as in the garden, the traditional elements--waterfall, rocks, trees, and birds, all convey subtle meanings and elicit a sensual response. Although the artist’s work is influenced by Japanese aesthetics it is also situated among the traditions of early Modernism, neoimpressionism, and American scene painters.

Miles Bair is a professor of art and the director of the Ames School of Art at Illinois Wesleyan University. Bair earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Edinboro University and a master’s degree from West Virginia University. His work is in numerous public and private collections.