IAN MILLER INTERVIEW FROM PORK MAGAZINE 15
I had the honor of interviewing Ian Miller for PORK magazine. I had this moment of realization that I could interview anyone I wanted, so I asked one of my favorite artists.
The first piece of Ian Miller’s I saw was his cover for the Spring 1987 Citadel Journal, I was 11 & familiar with the works of Bosch & Brueghel & Durer & was completely blown away to see art evoking my favorite artists on a lead miniatures catalog. I had already sussed out Games Workshop as a visionary company at that point, but this was beyond comprehension!
SEAN: How did your relationship with Games Workshop come about, how was it working for them? I was reading an old White Dwarf & noted in a promo for the Ratspike book that you were creating a fantasy art publishing wing & that Ratspike was going to be the first of these books.
IAN MILLER: John Blanche, the art director (then and now) invited me to a Golden Demon Day in Nottingham. Mid Eighties, I think? I went along out of curiosity, and met Bryan Ansell, John’s boss, and managing director/owner of Games Workshop. We got on well and it evolved from there. I enjoyed drawing for GW and the images seemed to fit in well, with what John called the ‘Mythos’. Sometime later, Bryan asked me if I was interested in heading up GW books and I said yes. I had a card with Commissioning Editor printed on it and opened offices in Brighton. It all went well for a while, then my desk capsized, and I was washed ashore in another place. This marked the end of my working relationship with Games Workshop, and of course the extended art book series.
SEAN: What is your house like? A Citadel of Chaos?
IAN: It’s a dark cupboard, bleached white on the outside. I think something grotesque lived here once? There are deep scratch marks and furrows on the walls, which plays havoc with my pink chalk when I’m writing messages to myself. It sits at an obtuse angle, on top of an old pig iron slipway running down to the sea. I can hear the shingle rattling with each turn of the tide. The bone white doors shake violently when the wind blows. And the slipway squeals. The view is startling. And I live here happily, with my wife and three dogs: Jesper, Jimmy (who’s invisible most of the time) and Snot, who hates seagulls.
SEAN: What are some things from your childhood that stand out as having formed your vision?
IAN: My mother was a theatrical milliner at a leading company of theatrical outfitters in London, who dressed most of the major films and theatre productions in the 40s and 50s.
Because of this, I was, from the outset, caught up in the most intimate workings of the Illusion Machine. My toy chests overflowed with the cast-offs and oddments from a score of film and theatre productions. Fact and Fiction were not in contention. Strange worlds could still be reached through the backs of cupboards, if you knew where to look. Bubble gum was made from Everglades swamp water – that was a fact. I remember, whilst travelling to Manchester on a steam train, seeing a herd of headless cows from the carriage window. When I mentioned it to the other occupants of the carriage, they just smiled, and said such things were common place in the North of England. I went to the cinema every Saturday afternoon, come rain or shine.
SEAN: You have done a bunch of work for movies, most notable for PORK readers your backgrounds for Ralph Bakshi's Wizards & Cool World. How did that come about, how was it working for Ralph & what an awesome choice!
IAN: In the 70s, 74 maybe?, I did a castle-scape of Gormeghast for a fantasy calendar commissioned by Ballatine Books in New York. Somebody working for Ralph saw this illustration and showed it to Ralph, who was in the throes of setting up the production for Wizards at his studio on Melrose Avenue in LA at the time. He tracked me down via London and New York to San Francisco, where I was living/stranded with my wife, on very meagre means at the Gaylord Hotel just off Union square. He flew us down to LA and offered me a job on the spot. The rest is history. (Ralph is hoping to makes Wizards 2. If enough people shout “YES!” it might happen a lot faster.) I started preliminary work for Lord of the Rings, then decided I wanted to return to the UK. For a while, it looked like I might work on the project there, but it didn’t happen. Much later came Cool World. I arrived late and left early. Despite this brief encounter, I think I contributed some interesting imagery to the film. I like Ralph and like working for him. He lays great store in the creative process and this makes for a very fertile working environment. It was always explosive, but never ever boring or commonplace.
SEAN: You did a bunch of cards for Magic the Gathering, I thought it was terrible that the art was so small.
IAN: The Magic card period was very interesting. Strange to say, despite the time which has elapsed since I last worked on a Magic project, it has never really gone away. Most every month I receive enquiries regarding the cards or the original art. I sold the very last original last month, and have put all the artist proof cards in an oversized shoe box and assigned them to a deep recess beneath the cupboard. The dogs think I buried a bone.
SEAN: I've been thinking a lot about Gothic architecture being a predecessor to Geiger's Bio-Mechanical style & your work undoubtedly has this Gothic, bio-mechanical, acid pattern feeling to it. I wonder if this is something that one tunes into, these bone structures & chitinous natural geometries... you contrast that with your trees, the chaotic trees.
IAN: Maybe going to the school dentist, and being given laughing gas helped. I was six years old. It was a strange place, situated on the second floor of a Georgian terrace, at the end of a dark brown painted corridor. All the doors hissed and closed slowly behind you. I think they were sniggering. I remember the rubber mask being put over my face–the bungled extraction–blurred voices–and everything twisting like toffee in a pink icy haze. After that, I spat blood all over the nurse, and toppled out of the dentist chair, which looked like an old witches ducking stool. Talking trees, flying buttresses and gargoyles were a gift after that, not to forget the steel claws cracking and shattering my teeth, of course. I think the juxtaposition of soft-edged organic forms against those of hard-edged angular geometric shapes creates a wonderful visual counterpoint in any image.
SEAN: Do you have any artist friends or peers that you bounce ideas off of nowadays?
IAN: Everybody I talk to is a potential sounding board. There is a common sympathy in all working processes. People like to be engaged, and illumination often emerges from the most unlikely places. I do, of course, talk with artist friends, but not often. I’ve just been dubbed a ‘recluse’ because I don’t Twitter or do Facebook, so where does that leave me? Closeted away and able to work without distractions, that’s where.
SEAN: You did some amazing covers for HP Lovecraft stories, your style well fits the indescribable terrors from beyond comprehension... how do you feel about drawing dreamworlds & things that should not be put into perceptual reality?
IAN: Such things seem to flow easily for me. That I manage to touch at something viewers think vital is to be celebrated. As to how I do it, I can’t in truth give you an answer, other than to say there is an empathy of some sort: ‘willow to water’. Whatever it is, I would rather respond on a purely visceral level, and leave the analysis, and wing pegging to somebody else.
SEAN: In terms of both summoning the Gothic bio-mechanical things & the indescribable terrors from outside the veil of consciousness, I feel that many artists are possibly possessed & are summoning things in their work. Do you have experiences that might shed light on this idea, is it poppycock, have you communicated with imperceivable intelligences?
IAN: I tap into, what I choose to call the Northern European tradition. I believe there is a constant residue of ideas, sounds, amorphous, no-name things, percolating through to us. Victor Hugo said something to the effect that we were ‘bottom feeders’ in an ocean of air surrounded by things we could see and hear, and others that we could not, or even guess at. That works for me. W. G. Sebald wrote: “In the obsessive attempt to find reason for the animation of life, a world of images is divided into its anatomical components. this is the operation of speech operating successfully. Thus the sound of speech strives to 'express' subjective and objective happening the 'inner' and 'outer' world: but what of this it can contain is not life or the fullness of existence but only a dead abbreviation of it.”
SEAN: What is your favorite ink? Watercolor? Pen?
IAN: Rohrer & Klingner a German range of inks made in Leipzig. Windsor and Newton on the watercolor front. Gillot and Speedball crow nibs for dip pens, and Rotring technical pens.
SEAN: Are there some new, younger artists whose work you're interested in?
IAN: I am interested in most everything creative and there are legions of brilliant young artists out there. Most days I find something to goggle at. Then I rediscover people I’ve forgotten or neglected. I am loath to mention one because then I would feel I’d side-lined another. I’d be writing names all night, if I got started.
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