Mostly fabricated daydreams in oil & acrylic.
Metro Detroit painter, songwriter, teacher.
Stories that reshape the familiar into somewhere new to explore.

Artist Statement

Lately, I find it more challenging and more exciting to paint from imagination. Inventing the light, the composition, the subject, and the narrative is harder than rendering what a photograph has already worked out. Slowly discovering a believable, emotive space that has never existed before — projecting my own thoughts and feelings through every stage of the process — is far more rewarding.

I begin with no preconceived idea and no predetermined destination. I read the brushstrokes and values as they emerge, developing the composition first, then the subject, and finally the narrative. I do sometimes work from observation, but even then I usually add something invented, an element that sharpens the narrative or a more dramatic field of color, so the painting becomes more than the scene in front of me.

Three to five days a week, I teach oil painting at the Atelier School of Art, where students learn to paint from observation using photographic sources. I believe in that method for teaching the fundamentals, but my own work pulls in the opposite direction.

My fictional landscapes are believable places to explore, not fantasy scenery. They're autobiographical. They carry my introspective wanderlust and mark moments of memory, along with my response to the times I'm living through. They are meant to be felt. They do not need to be fully understood.

Bio

photo by Jeff Canselosi

Steve Miller

Drawing on decades of experience as a painter, graphic designer, and musician, Steve Miller (not that Steve Miller) creates expressive, immersive narrative landscapes in oil and acrylic.

Miller showed an early talent for music, and after his first concert, Van Halen touring behind 1984, he was set on becoming a professional rock star. He formed and played drums in bands as a teenager and through college, becoming a sought-after, hard-hitting alt-rock drummer. While chasing that dream, he worked at a t-shirt print shop, designing flyers and merch for local bands and friends in his free time. It was his introduction to graphic design. None of it, though, could pull him away from his deep love of telling personal stories through painting. Visual art was a solo endeavor. He didn't have to rely on bandmates sharing his work ethic, and he came to savor the long stretches of deep creative focus.

After earning a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Oklahoma in 1995, Miller spent several years as an art director at advertising agencies in Dallas and Chicago while developing his fine art practice, then moved to Michigan in 2002 to pursue his art career full-time.

As an independent artist, Miller has shown in over 70 local and regional exhibitions and won a handful of awards, including the 2019 Corinne Maillard Robinson Award from the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center for his painting Stasis Hiatus. That same year, his painting Ben Jamin was selected for the Art Explored program, with an outdoor reproduction displayed publicly in downtown Royal Oak. In 2014, the Detroit Institute of Arts exhibited Ofrenda to Robin Williams, his collaborative sculpture with artist Alex Goecke. Over the years he has donated paintings to communities and causes he supports, and has served as a curator and juror for exhibitions across Southeast Michigan. He teaches oil painting at the Atelier School of Art in downtown Royal Oak, where he also works as Studio Coordinator, and, when asked, designs logos and brand identities for creative entrepreneurs.

In his downtime, he loves hanging with his wife and nearly grown daughters, and writing, recording, and performing with his bands Raccoon Dogs and Covid Bros. around metro Detroit.

Exhibitions

Current & Upcoming

Teaching

Oil Painting Classes

Steve teaches oil painting at the Atelier School of Art in Royal Oak, Michigan on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays. Whether you're a beginner learning to interpret color for the first time or an experienced painter looking to push your work conceptually or technically, Steve's classes are grounded in observation, technique, storytelling, and community.

Connect

For press inquiries, exhibition proposals, or wholesale print inquiries, download the press kit or get in touch directly.

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