Harland Miller

Miller began his career as a writer. After graduating from the Chelsea School of Art in 1988, he initially pursued fiction, publishing his first novel Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty in 2000. This work combined dark humour with a sense of Northern melancholy, qualities that would also inform his visual work. Around this time, Miller began developing a parallel practice as a painter, merging his literary sensibility with a visual vocabulary inspired by book covers. His breakthrough came with a series of large-scale paintings based on the classic Penguin paperbacks. These works allowed him to combine his interests in language, design, and narrative. Through this synthesis, Miller established himself as a visionary figure straddling the worlds of literature and contemporary art.

Miller’s paintings and editions are characterised by their wry, text-based imagery, often combining familiar book cover formats with invented titles that blend irony, melancholy, and deadpan humour. Drawing on Pop Art, abstraction and conceptual art, his work explores themes of identity, nostalgia, and the absurdity of self-help culture. The classic Penguin and Pelican book motifs serve both as nostalgic cultural symbols and as vehicles for his personal and satirical commentary. Behind the wit lies a preoccupation with failure, resilience, and the search for meaning, issues that reflect his literary background and his interest in the interplay between text and image.