| Godfrey Miller, Still Life, Fruit and Flower, 1957-61 |
John Henshaw, a close friend and former student of Miller’s, wrote about this painting in his 1965 book on Godfrey Miller.
‘Innumerable pencil sketches from objects which lay about on the kitchen table, fruit, comports, vases, flowers, fill notebooks. They furnished a world, sometimes in a completely transfigured state, like the matchbox in the lower right corner of this still life. The most banal objects could be the raw material of a microcosm, their existence tremendously intensified. As such, they add their unique character to a series of still lifes which belong among the finest of the century. The rectangle containing the comport, and the rectangle with the vase and flowers divide the canvas into two contrary areas, they are united in no ordinary space but an imponderable counterspace, full of colourful diversity.’
“If I had my time over again I would paint still life,” Miller wrote to a friend in Hobart in the last year of his life.
Julia Ritson
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