Brent Millar: Empathy, Energy, Joy and Body Hair
Brent Millar has always carried his great talent with a light touch. It is a true painter's touch - direct, searching, sensual - which finds form in a fabulously rich body of work, bound together by the truth of an almost child-like vision. In Brent's work, appearances are deceptive. These pictures are playful, but like the swans that glide in and out of his paintings, the artist is hard at work just below the surface. Each picture comes straight from the mouth of babes, but Brent's work also summons a world of poetry, half-hidden below the surface, which is the stuff and substance of life. Whether Empathy, Energy, Joy or Body Hair, Brent paints the stuff we're made of. In art as in life, it's all there - you just need to look closely.
Douglas Erskine
Brent was born in Edinburgh in 1950 and studied at Edinburgh College of Art (1968-72) under the guidance of Sir Robin Philipson and Elizabeth Blackadder. After his undergraduate degree, he attended the summer school at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, before gaining a scholarship to undertake a postgraduate degree in Amsterdam. During this time Brent also travelled to Berlin where he experienced the city's lively artistic community. Brent went on to spend 17 years teaching in schools in London before returning to Edinburgh in 1992 to focus solely on his artistic practice.
Brent creates dreamlike compositions where observation and imagination blur harmoniously. Birds are a unifying theme in his practice, emerging as the symbolic link between music and nature. Starlings, goldfinches, chaffinches and swans repeatedly sweep into his paintings, defined in areas of saturated colour and delineated by bold strokes.
With a complex palette, the artist layers and re-works his compositions, contrasting areas of chaos with patches of calm. His practice extends into both print and drawing but relies on paint as his medium of choice. The influence of Picasso, Matisse and Francis Bacon permeates his work and an impressionist brushstroke is employed in his vivid flower studies. Not beholden to trend or fashion in contemporary art, Brent has forged his own path to become a respected, sought-after figure in the Edinburgh art scene.
