The work of every artist constitutes a "self-portrait," a particular self, perceived in a particular environment. This environment can be a landscape, a culture, the world, the universe; the perception can reflect what is seen today, through the filter of the past or in the imagined future.

At birth, a window opens, and we peer out onto a vast stage, and our lives consist of trying to understand the unfolding drama and of trying to make our way within it. Then, the window closes and art is left behind and the process of trying to see and understand continues, but for other selves and in other places.

Everything that I've seen, everything that I've imagined is raw material for my art. My focus is not on abstraction. What I'm about is reflecting reality and making things that become real in and of themselves. I want to try to understand seeing and language and meaning and knowledge; as if these things were imperfect, as indeed they are. Art is all search and invention and as with life itself, the things that are questions are always more compelling than the things that are known.

— J. Pindyck Miller

Essay By William Hennessey, Director of The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA.

J. Pindyck Miller has referred to himself as a constructivist. This seems both an apt and misleading label. On one hand Miller does deal in his work with abstract geometric forms. His pieces are clean, hard-edged, reductive, not representational in the traditional sense. In this quality and in their frank use of industrial non-artistic materials they recall the efforts of any number of artists of the early-20th century. However, there are other aspects of Miller's work which seem to disassociate it from the hermetic rationalism of the true constructivists or from the impulse to break up and fragment the visible world that is so much a part of cubism. Miller's works always keep one foot firmly planted in the representational or at least associative world.

Like his sculpture J. P. Miller is frank and open, freely acknowledging the sources of his personal and artistic inspiration. That he admires the art of Conrad Marca-Relli, George Ortman, and especially David Smith comes as no surprise to those who have seen his work. But to say that Miller's use of railway and landscape imagery in the 1970 s Signal Series is similar to Smith's in such works as "Hudson River Landscape” must not be understood to mean that Miller's art is in any way derivative. It is not.

A good part of Miller's art is about basic sensation-sculpture as object, a physical presence that shares our space. Miller loves machines and fine craftsmanship. He is excited by a beautifully machined tool or piece of farm equipment. He likes the practical reality of such objects. But Miller is also an idealist, a man inspired by heroic ambition and by uncompromising standards. He is a serious man who reflects on the human condition and who attempts in a certain way to understand something of man's place in the universe and to express this through his art. He has spoken of the Wright Brothers, of Eli Whitney, and Robert Fulton as personal heroes-men who have had the skill and imagination to create something new that was both visionary and practical. Like all good romantics, Miller has his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground.

Miller's romanticism sets him apart from many of the more cynical artists of his generation. He does not follow fashion, deliberately avoiding it just as he does eye-catching gimmicks and tricks. Miller lives in the woods near Brewster, New York, at a comfortable distance from the distractions of the New York City art scene. He does this to retain perspective as he works at an art that seeks to balance paradoxical alternatives: abstract-referential, physical-spiritual, practical-ideal, modern-universal. Miller believes in traditional abstraction as a means toward synthesis. Confronted with a chaotic universe he achieves in his work a pattern and consistency.