Miller has declared his love of books themselves, not just as the means to carry a story but as objects in their own right. He is a particular fan of Edgar Allen Poe having curated events to popularise the work of the 19th century writer. In 2001 he began a series of paintings based on the dust jackets of Penguin books. By appropriating the iconic Penguin logo, he found a way to combine painting with his writer’s love of words. Influenced by pop art his work draws attention to the inherent emotional possibilities of language inside a painting, employing humour and irony.

In his ongoing dust jacket series, he usually works with books as still lives or three-dimensional objects, each with their own unknown but personal histories. They may not have been read. They may have been gifted, sold, cherished, re-found or even rebound. The painting style hints at the dog-eared and scuffed covers of the classics themselves and he uses his own titles to further enrich these histories.

Drawing on his own extensive archive of social science and psychology books, a more recent series of paintings including Immediate Relief…Coming Soon (2017), make formal references to the covers of self-help manuals from the 1960s and 1970s. Characterised by their bold and colourful abstract covers, these books embrace the potential for ‘fixing’ disorders. Their distinct, colourful geometric cover designs were not only aligned to contemporary abstract painting, but also provide a foil to the darker aspects of social neurosis that the texts are seeking to address.

Miller has had solo exhibitions at York Art Gallery in 2020 and in Segovia and Gateshead. He has also featured in the ‘Summer Exhibition’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, (2005, 2006, 2007), at Somerset House and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Buy his artwork at mainstream galleries here.