Sarah Gee Miller — The Joy Project

Continuing the Art of Play
July 9, 2025

Artist: Sarah Gee Miller

Join Zoom Meeting / Class
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87618016665

As a collagist and painter, Sarah Gee Miller’s work is largely concerned with clarity, equilibrium and the expressive possibilities of vibrant colour. The formality of hard-edged abstraction fascinates her, as it hides its energy and emotion behind imposed order and a minimal vocabulary. Her work can be described as “warm modernism” particular to the Pacific coast, where the saturated light, and encompassing wilderness and a persistent sense of newness and optimism – undimmed over the decades – has resulted in a more organic, nearly biomorphic approach.

Newzones Gallery of Contemporary Art

Warm-up
Let’s warm-up creating concentric circles (targets) as a meditation. Circles within circles round and round. Use any materials you wish. Please do not be concerned with being precise. Be lost and free as you lay down color after color.

Project
The project may be a more elaborate circle painting.

2nd Option:
Gather stencils or templates to do a layered design inspired by Miller’s organic shape paintings.

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“In many ways painting targets hits a kind of sweet spot between the formal and the aesthetic. Target, of course, being shorthand for concentric circles, a bewitching image drawn since our species could pull a stick through dust. Miller believes she could paint targets forever and never run out of ways to alter, change, enhance and engage them. See them as you will, as meditative, instructive, divine or basic; to her they are a visual respite, and they will always form a central part of her practice.”