ABOUT JEREMY SCOTT-MILLER

I was born in London on the seventh day of the seventh month in 1955. For my Dads work we moved to Norfolk to a group of cottages called Santon. There was no electricity, only Calor gas and the water had to be pumped from a well in the kitchen and living area. I used to go fossil hunting with my Mum, and duck flighting at dusk with my Dad. The River Little Ouse ran at the back of our garden and I spent hours fishing and gazing in the river letting my imagination take over. It was this environment that I fell in love with nature. In my bed-room there was a small reproduction picture by Paul Clay, my Dad has a love for surrealism and painted some fine paintings. Also my mother went to St. Martins and was always drawing. Aunty Doreen married a danish artist called Lars Bo. His work was always around the house.

I spent my childhood between London and Norfolk and holidaying in Scotland, which is where my mother was born, in Perthshire. It was from this source that I got my imagery that I use to this day.

I was useless academically at school and was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was fourteen. The only subject that I was good at was art. It was at a parents evening when my biology/zoology teacher stated how good my diagrams were, of the insides of animals, and that I should be encouraged to draw more, so my mother enrolled me at Camden Arts Centre to do an art a level and to draw and paint from a life model. I was tutored by Sargy Mann and Aubrey Williams. It was there that I discovered the beautiful colours of the impressionist.

After a couple of years there, and working for my Dad part-time, my mother showed my paintings and drawings to a family friend, Murial Pemberton. She was head of fashion at St. Martins. The next thing I know, I’ on the foundation course at St. Martins. It was 1973 and Soho was just around the corner, you could still find in those days, Edward Burra, having a pint at the Coach and Horses. Then there was the french pub, Colony Club etc. I loved it there and really did not want to move on, but I did. I was encouraged to apply to the Slade School of Art, and got in. There was no structure in the classes and you just got on with your work. My tutor for the first year was the performance artist, Stuart Brissley. He was more interested in my messy working space, than my paintings! I was feeling increasingly isolated, as a painter and feeling more like an outsider. William Coldstream was the professor when I first came. When he retired, Lawrence Gowing took over. He was more interested in whom you met at the Slade and who could help you in your career as an artist. This was no good for me as I was shy, and still am!

I left the Slade with a Boise Travel Scholarship, to New York, and won the Amy Sadur Friedlander Art Fund Award to travel to Italy. First I went to Italy, to stay in a place called Capena, ten Miles from Rome. It was 1979, Aldo Moro, the Italian P.M. was kid-napped by the Italian red brigade, so any where we drove we were stopped and searched, but i did manage to go to the Peruzzi Chapels to see my favourite Italian artist Giotto. Tuscany was beautiful and reminded me of Piero Della Francesca Paintings. In Capanna; through a friend, I met an Etruscan grave robber, who gave me a sculpture of a severed foot from a grave! I came back to London and had a bad motor cycle accident and nearly severed my foot. I spent a long time in hospital. So now out of hospital I was offered a one man show at the Air Gallery, London. The show was well received and the arts council bought a painting. The Guardian newspaper and Time Out gave me reviews,

“Everywhere you look teeth are sinking into necks, claws are being embedded into backs, eyes are narrowing and fangs are showing. In each painting is brightly lit like an aquarium the mutated survivors of the animal kingdom pat on a gladiatorial display for outsiders. This exhibition also boats a very strange, very exotic beauty. The colours are bright, deadly and irresistible. A blue bear attacks a pink bird. Three red-eyed eels attempt to tie themselves into a reef knot against a mediterranean blue sky. There are constant reminders of british surrealism from between the walls of Edward Wansworth’s nautical pictures, of Tristram Hillier and Paul Nash. Then as now, the art seemed to be airless, every one seemed uneasy, waiting. This first one man show reveals Jeremy Scott-Miller to be an important and jumpy artist”

Waldemar Januszczak, The Guardian

“The pale interiors in Jeremy Scott-Millers paintings are peopled by sea monsters arranged in static groupings as though posing for their photograph. They stand on flipper like feet, their fins and reptilian necks intertwine with neither hostility not affection. It is impossible to guess what these curious still-lives could signify, since their imagery is so distinct and personal.”

Sarah Kent, Time Out

At the same time of my Air Gallery Show was on, I was on a Scholarship to study for a year at the Stedelijk Art Museum in Amsterdam. After that was finished I returned to live in New York. I had studios in Spring Street, Little Italy and Brooklyn by the water front and Williamsburg. I became a member of the Brooklyn water front artists and exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum and the Supreme Court House, New York and the Federal Bar Council W.Y.

Breton Gunderson wrote in the catalogue about me.

“The mythical creatures inhabiting the paintings of Jeremy Scott-Miller are compelling in a dual sense. Part animal and part fantasy, they are presented in such a way as to both entice and repel the viewer into and away from their tangled underworld.

Sinuous, sensos and sinister, these creatures exist in surreal worlds, inextricably interlocked in a tantalising jungle of limbs. Horses, birds, fish, snakes, and trees appear enmeshed in snarls of uncertain passions.

The predominant image of Miller’s works portrays the predicament of a mythical horse set in simple backgrounds of prehistoric and futuristic imaginings, beset upon by intertwining animal forms that wind and wrap their way around the horse’s body. The rhythmic, curvaceous counters of these forms are echoed throughout the landscape, leading a hypnotically erotic emphasis to the drama. Together with a vivid use of surreal and symbolic color, these images provoke a disturbing sense of preternatural ritual.

Jeremy Scott-Miller cites references to the worlds of modern mythology and Celtic spirits, stating that his work “is as much an exorcism ad an inspiration.”

These images appear to illustrate myths from the cult of the Celtic white horse, with the traditional zoomorphic god-forms of the raven, the fish, the snake and the horse gradually abstracting into exotic expressions of an esoteric modern mythology.”

I got married in Brooklyn register office and then my wife got pregnant so we came back to London to have my first son Angus. I had rented out my acme studio in Hackney Wick so I reclaimed it and painted there. After a few years we moved to Hastings where my second son Freddie, was born. We moved back to London after a few years. To make ends meet, I rented a shop in Portobello Road selling 20th Century Paintings, that I bought from various auctions. At the back of the shop I had my studio. Then in 1999 I got divorced. I went through a barren five years when I did not paint but I drew a lot in sketch books, in 2002 I moved to Amsterdam and lived with the artist, Josephine King. I then moved to Norwich and started to paint again. I still live in this semi-detached property, built a year after I was born. I have turned every room into an art piece and I am happy here. I live alone and paint just about every day.

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