Katherine Muir Miller — Falling in Love with Art

Katherine Muir Miller — Falling in Love with Art - theHumm March 2021

By Sally Hansen

Art… and Soul

Landscape artist Katherine Muir Miller’s brilliant paintings tap into the same subject matter that inspired Canada’s beloved Group of Seven artists — the great northern Canadian landscape in all its seasonal glories. This is where she finds her inspiration — rooted in her mother’s deep love of trees and fostered by her own and her five children’s passion for the magnificent and wild Canadian outdoors.

Many Canadians can’t look at a painting of stark pines outlined against the sky at the edge of a northern lake without thinking of Tom Thomson or A. Y. Jackson. The Group of Seven clearly succeeded in realizing their stated ambition back in the 1920s to create a fertile ground from which a new generation of uniquely Canadian art would grow. For Katherine Muir Miller, their success is a double-edged sword. Newcomers to the eponymous founder’s stunning new art gallery in Perth frequently react with comments comparing her vibrant landscapes to those painted by our best-known national art figures.

What sets her work apart is her unique use of their established language. Her playful, experimental use of colour, the textures she builds, the gestures, and the freedom of her brushstrokes combine to produce her fresh take on a familiar natural world. A literary analogy comes to mind. Many writers use the same language to explore similar subject matter. Some produce literature that is mundane; others achieve the sublime. Muir Miller’s landscapes have the power to transport you to a sublime place.

What she loves most about her paintings is the stories they represent. Katherine bases her landscapes on memories of cross-country travel, and on photos her adult kids and friends take on their harrowing canoeing and hiking and skiing trips across Canada’s incredible rugged outdoors. Photographers claim that looking at an image they have taken transports them back to the time and place and circumstances of the shoot. Katherine’s impressionistic realism paintings evoke and intensify the same response for viewers and clients who are fortunate enough to reconnect with the scenes she celebrates.

Falling Headfirst

Katherine’s own story is one of reinvention — her art is her salvation. Six years ago a catastrophic fall caused serious damage to her face and head; broken bones resulted in vestibular damage, visual damage, and neurocognitive damage that permanently ended her career as an ER nurse at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital in Ottawa. It also put an end to all of the sports activities that had characterized her exceptionally active role as a mother — hockey, skating, skiing, running — even walking was out of the question for quite a while.

Her healing process included physical therapy, chiropractic care, vision and balance therapy, and rebuilding torn neck muscles. The most important part of her healing didn’t start until several months after her traumatic accident. In an attempt to cope with the devastating losses to her sense of identity and purpose, Muir Miller pulled out a canvas and decided to paint. She had dabbled in art before, but never seriously. Six hours later she realized she had been symptom-free for the entire time — no dizziness, no headache, no pain. “And from then on, I never even looked back.”

The injuries to her head obviously did not quench her “just do it” spirit. As she puts it, “I’m a highly motivated person. When I dive into something I do it 110%.” At first she painted therapeutically, but then she embarked on an energetic and targeted path to pursue her passion to paint Canadian landscapes. She started taking lessons at the Ottawa School of Art in 2014, and from 2015 to 2018 she studied with Ottawa artist Gordon Harrison.

Katherine credits Harrison with encouraging her to tap into her own creativity and find her own path to expressing her passion for the Canadian wilderness. Her fascination with colour is the key to her success and her greatest pleasure. Sometimes she spends as much time “making” her oil paint colours as she does painting the scene she has been visualizing in her mind’s eye for days. Her most successful paintings are those she has thought about for the longest time. Her least favourite question is “How long did it take you to paint that?”. Her advice to novice painters is to be patient; creativity will come “all in the goodness of time.”

Eventually, as their home was filling up with her exuberant art works, she sought independent validation beyond the growing encouragement from family and friends. In 2018 she applied for the “Artist Project” show in Toronto and was thrilled to be waitlisted. As a result, the “One of a Kind” show in Toronto invited her to exhibit her works, and with her family’s help and support, her professional career was off and running. For three years she participated in a growing variety of shows, but early in 2020, Covid put an abrupt end to all her exciting new show plans. She isn’t sure how the stars aligned to present her with her newest opportunity, but a walk in Perth with a friend resulted in her current reinvention of herself. At her companion’s urging, Katherine checked out a “For Lease” sign at 22 Gore St. East, and, with her supportive family’s urging and help, created the Katherine Muir Miller Gallery.

Muir Miller is a realist — she knew she was and wanted to be a painter, not a businessperson. So she listened to her life coach and friend Darlene Kelly, and has hired the business and technical support she needs to stay focused on her painting. During Gallery hours you can drop in at 22 Gore St. East and catch her painting with her dog Meeko at her side. Her coordinates are listed on the back of her Artist Trading Card in the righthand corner above, and her Virtual Assistant keeps her information current on her website at katherinemuirmiller.com and all her other social media. Katherine thanks her fantastic family for their support in enabling her to turn a catastrophe into a gift.