'I suppose mine is a very English sense of humour……It’s a humour from the North East, the humour I grew up with… But it’s not always about taking the piss, and satire, there’s a love of the form as well.'
—Harland MillerWriter and artist, Harland Miller, is known for his playful re-working of Penguin book covers as paintings and prints. ‘I remember my parents’ Penguin books,’ states Miller. ‘For me, they are about nostalgia for a by-gone era – that musty smell, those coffee-mug rings, the often heart-breaking inscriptions on the inside cover.’ Miller’s practice evolved in tandem with his love for books both as sculptural objects and as the carriers of humour, irony, and emotion.
Marrying aspects of Ed Ruscha’s Pop, and Mark Rothko’s Abstraction with a writer’s love of pithy phrase, Miller pointedly combines text and image. He remains sensitive to the emotive effects of colour and uses printmaking to explore the range of meaning he can inspire with variations of the same fictional dust jackets. Says Miller, ‘It’s endlessly fascination to me… If it’s pink, then there’s a kind of levity to it. But if you change it to green, people don’t have the same connection. Same title, same layout, you change the colour and people read it in a different way, they don’t even know why that’s happening.’