Dorothy Parker could fit a whole broken heart into one line. Harland Miller does the same thing, but he paints it two metres tall.
In 1935 Allen Lane started Penguin Books with a simple idea. Good books should cost about as much as a packet of cigarettes. The covers were plain on purpose: a band of colour, a band of white, the title, the author. Orange meant fiction. The books were made to be bought on a train platform and read until the spine cracked.
Miller, born in Yorkshire in 1964, grew up with those paperbacks. From the early 2000s he began painting them at enormous size. He keeps the bands and the familiar layout, then swaps in titles of his own: "You Can Rely on Me, I'll Always Let You Down." "Death, What's In It For Me?" Each one reads like a joke at first, then like something you once said and wish you hadn't.
Up close, you can see they are oil paintings, not prints. The paint drips, the corners look chewed, and there are stains that look like coffee rings. He paints the wear and tear as carefully as the title. They look like books that have been loved, dropped and carried around for years.
Miller is also a writer. His novel Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty came out in 2000, and you can feel that in the paintings. He thinks like an author who loves a good line.
That's why he belongs in Big Blonde. Parker wrote about bad gin, worse men and the brave face you put on afterwards. Miller paints the cover you'd put on that story. It's funny, it's sad, and it doesn't ask for sympathy.
