Horizontal Detritus

These large digital prints represent a late-career manifesto of how painterly concerns, such as color, structure, and materiality, translate into the digital age. Vertical panels divide a complex accumulation of visual noise. It’s a modular format that fragments and recomposes the picture plane so that pattern, texture, and gesture unfold as a sequence rather than a single image. The underlying picture is a digital collage of scanned textures and layered effects. Miller’s process was iterative: he spliced photographs with digital patterns in vibrant hues, manipulating and “drafting” compositions over progressive iterations.

Miller was in his seventies when he made this series. After a long career of painting works of layered, gestural abstraction with Fauve-inspired palettes, the artist turned to the computer in the late 1990s, explaining: “I ended up becoming a digital image painter through the many uses of Photoshop’s tools and effects.” Here we see that process in action, through the use of layered gradients, posterized color fields, cut-out shapes, and overprinted scribbles that read like scanned brushstrokes.

Miller’s shift to digital painting followed experiments in the 1990s with collage and photography using urban detritus. Laminating junk mail or photographing debris near his West Loop studio, he explored the aesthetic potential of discarded materials. He later found an outlet for these interests in digital imagery. Reflecting on this turn in a late statement, Miller makes the connection explicit, saying that his digital paintings “combine photographs and scans of found objects that have lost their functionality, but have gained beauty because of traffic, neglect, and decomposition.”