Max Miller
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Max Miller was born in 1980 to a family of artists and craftsmen. His early years were characterized by his family constantly moving among various locations throughout North Carolina and Texas. Without any steady playmates, drawing became his chief activity. Max’s parents would bring home reams of discarded paper, which he would set about covering with monsters. His father began working as an art director in the movie industry when Max was very young; some of his earliest memories are of accompanying his father to the sets of various films. The earliest painting Max remembers appreciating, apart from his fathers work, was a reproduction on canvas of ‘Saturn Devouring His Children’ by Francisco Goya.
In 1991 Max and his family moved to Charleston, South Carolina. During adolescence, he continued drawing and gained an appreciation for the human form by copying superheroes from comic books. In 1997, he was selected to attend the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts summer program. The following year, Max began undergraduate studies at the College of Charleston.
Max’s initial focus at college was sculpture, from which he branched into printmaking and photography. One evening during his third year, he found a paintbrush and a half-empty tube of burnt umber in a trashcan in the school’s painting studio. After using these to rework a drawing, Max discovered an intense desire to devote himself to painting. In 2001, he traveled to Spain and visited the Museo del Prado, where he finally saw the painting of ‘Saturn Devouring His Children’ in person. Max was also exposed for the first time to the work of Jose Ribera, whose paintings continue to inspire him. The next year, he was awarded the Visual Art Scholarship from the College of Charleston and graduated with a double B.A. in Studio Art and Art History.
For the next two years Max set about creating work for several solo exhibitions and group shows. Yearning for more instruction in the realistic path he had begun to follow, he was pointed in the direction of the classical atelier tradition. Max was accepted into the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy during the summer of 2004. By January of 2005 he was teaching beginner sculpture at Cecil Studios in the morning, and studying painting in the afternoons. Under Cecil his understanding of beauty, anatomy and composition flourished like never before.
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