Godfrey MILLER

New Zealander 1893–1964
worked in England 1933–39, Australia 1939–64

Godfrey Miller graduated as an architect in New Zealand. He visited the Philippines, China and Japan then lived between Australia and Europe until he settled in Sydney in 1939. Daniel Thomas describes Miller, living in London in the 1930s, as: ‘deeply involved with Chinese art, Indian philosophy, cubism, abstraction and Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art’.1 Like John Passmore, also teaching at the National Art School in Sydney, Godfrey Miller’s analytical and methodical style of painting was based on a study of Cézanne. Trees in quarry, 1961-63, is Miller’s homage to the many paintings Cézanne made of the quarry at Bibemus. It is also, like all Godfrey Miller’s art, a painting about philosophy. By dividing up the painting into a proportion of one third to the whole—the classical system of proportion called the golden section—Miller set up a geometrical matrix in each painting on which he based his composition. The golden section was considered in classical times the proportion of perfection. In the Renaissance it symbolised the Trinity. This matrix gave the artist the means to set up a rhythmic harmony of proportionally smaller divisions, each painted in cool and warm colours in such a way that his canvases appear to glow with an inner luminous light.

1 D. Thomas, Outlines of Australian Art. The Joseph Brown Collection, Melbourne, 1974, p. 58.

Jennifer Phipps

Daniel Thomas explains Miller’s search to show the overarching unity of all things when he quotes Dante, who wrote: ‘All things are arranged in a certain order and this constitutes the form by which the Universe resembles God’.1 Miller considered the quote ‘a splendid approach to painting a still-life’.2 Still life with jug, 1949–54, is a model of an ordered world, where the central jug and scattered fruit are united within an analytical geometry of fine lines. In both these paintings, objects dissolve into the abstract geometry and the carefully applied colour. As can be seen by the dates, Miller took a long time to finish a painting. He frequently extended the painting over the frame, or nailed the canvas to plywood, onto which he continued the lines of his matrices. This was to indicate that a painting did not finish at the edge of the canvas but was part of a greater whole. Godfrey Miller’s art was a revelation to students and artists when he first exhibited with the Sydney Group at the Macquarie Galleries in 1952.

1 D. Thomas, Outlines of Australian Art. The Joseph Brown Collection, Melbourne, 1974, p. 58.

2 ibid.

Jennifer Phipps