Meet Mike Miller | Printmaker

We had the good fortune of connecting with Mike Miller and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Mike, how has your perspective on work-life balance evolved over time?
When I consider a work/life balance, it’s hard for me to make room for the “life” part. I think part of being a practicing artist and entrepreneur is totally integrating your work with your life – there oughta be no separation of one from the other.

I love to make prints – primarily lithographs, screenprints, intaglio work and then some relief. This is something I could do all day, past and through the point of exhaustion. I oftentimes do this. Printmaking is unlike other art practices because of process – sure, it takes time to investigate and make decisions in order to execute a large scale oil painting – but print requires a diligence and adherence to steps. That is why I like it.

In order to print a stone lithograph, I first must grain the stone – a labor intensive process that involves wet sanding the top surface of limestone and buffing it down to a smooth finish – then I build an image on the stone, itself the most non-linear process of all time – next comes chemically etching the stone, replacing the drawing material with printing ink, and etching it again. Only then can I start proofing and printing!

This kind of workflow doesn’t happen over a lunch break. It is an entire day. And even then, results can often be unpredictable and even downright bad. It’s a process of trial and error. I like digging in. I like working past midnight and waking up at 8. Life happens as a result of my dedication to an art practice.

But I do try and build in a rest day. God rested on the 7th day. I’m just a guy making prints. Every now and then it’s good to have an afternoon to spend with friends in the sunshine. But if I stop producing work, it becomes harder to get the ball rolling again. The goal posts are always moving.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I’ve had a pretty unconventional journey through the art world, so far. I had always drawn and painted for fun, and was encouraged by my art teachers to pursue a career in fine arts through one avenue or another.

So when I enrolled as an undergrad, I expected my journey to be smooth and linear – it was not! I changed majors five times and eventually dropped out to work full time in a mom-and-pop burger restaurant. I was lost! Eventually, four years later, I returned to school and finished my degree. I had so many credit hours that ‘General Studies’ was the quickest path to graduation. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew that I couldn’t work in restaurants forever!

While finishing college, I met my mentor Brian Kelly, the printmaking professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He took me under his wing and taught me relief printing, lithography, and screenprint. I learned how to collaborate with visiting artists – as well as my other colleagues in the print shops – and suddenly I had a direction. I thought to myself: ‘hey, this guy Brian seems to have it figured out. Running a print shop and getting to facilitate student-artists making prints all day would be a pretty good gig!’

I’ve been chasing that dream ever since. Print media has so many avenues for exploration. And it’s a rich conceptual firmament to dig into. Print has made so much of the visual world that we’re all accustomed to. The design decisions that dictate how our social media feeds look can trace their way back to the OGs arranging type in the 1800s. Modern print technologies – like photolithography, CMYK screenprinting, and pin registration – mean that, as an artist, I can work like a cultural DJ and collage imagery from across time and place to create compositions that feel alive and speak truth. In some way. That is always the goal.

My art practice today is dominated by printmaking – lithography, screenprint, and intaglio specifically. I work with digital tools like Blender and the Adobe suite to make things happen on lithographic stone that Alois Senefelder, the inventor of lithography in 1798, could have never imagined possible – at least, that is one aspect of my workflow that excites me the most.

Currently, I am investigating the ways that social media algorithms are changing behavior. What happens to a person after 10+ years of 8 hours of screen time a day? I use LiDAR (light detection and ranging) cameras to simulate what I call the “algorithmic eye,” that combination of surveillance tech that aims to know a user better than they know themselves. Algorithms, today, are so powerful that it seems like they know me better than I know myself – how can I, as an artist, create imagery that speaks to this uncomfortable reality?

I employ LiDAR cameras to map bedrooms, living rooms, and interior spaces of social media users. It’s like I’m doing the work of the all-seeing algorithm for it. I take these depth maps and feed them into asticaVision, a powerful image-to-text AI, and let it select different objects within each scan that it finds interesting. It puts a box around these objects – and I draw them by hand and incorporate them into each print.

It’s an exercise of letting a machine tell me what to do – tell me what it thinks is important for me to draw. I think that that is something very important to me as an artist, right now – investigating the place of the handmade mark in fine art. Especially in the wake of AI-produced artwork that can quickly outpace anything that a blood-and-bones artist can produce.

LiDAR scans print as beautifully weird, gloopy shapes from lithographic stone. I think it’s the coolest thing in the world that the process can happen, at all.

So, I guess to answer this question more specifically, I am pulling at this thread of waning human agency in our AI world…and letting the work respond to my research. Print is the perfect medium for this stuff, since it is reactive and easy to disseminate.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I have actually done this recently! But I’m not sure it was as optimized as your question prompts me to be. My parents came to visit – and I live in a remote college town in Appalachian Ohio – and we spent the weekend driving through the countryside and making prints in the shop.

I guess that’s my ideal scenario, actually. I’d like to invite my friends into the print shops and introduce them to print – monotype, collagraph, simple linocut and screenprinting – this stuff can be so empowering for newbies. It’s like, “wow, I didn’t know I could do this stuff so easily!” A lot of people walk into a print shop, scope out the large presses and machines, and just assume that it is off limits, somehow. I want my friends to know what my life is like. I wanna share it with them. Break bread with them.

I’d show ’em the shops.

Ya know, I’d also probably take them to some weird con. My partner and I went to a furry con once, and it was the most eye-opening experience of all time. Seeing people find joy in the most unusual spaces was really inspiring an wholesome, to us. Just people finding love in a hopeless place.

So – print shops, maybe a weird con, and then – maybe touch grass by some body of water? I’m not good at turning off, but when I do, I like to lay out in the sun. Better to do that with friends.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’ve got to give credit to literally everyone who’s helped me and mentored me along the way to where I am now – a recent MFA-haver, practicing artist and excited art teacher.

Thank you to Brian Kelly from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette – my print mentor and greatest advocate. The direction and advice I’ve gotten from Brian has set me on a path to a viable, joyful career in the arts. Without his guidance and encouragement, I’d still be working in restaurants full time.

Alongside Brian are my friends, loved ones, and colleagues that have nudged me in the right direction. Thank you to my partner Nat – my better half – for picking me up when I’m down, and for inspiring me with your dedication to social research and service.

Thank you to Jacob Taylor Gibson, my print friend from day 1, and to Zoë Couvillion, a wickedly talented, passionate, imaginative printmaker who I turn to constantly for technical advice and the deeper questions of print *as a thing that we are doing.*

I have to thank my Mom and Dad, and my two sisters, for loving me and supporting my perilous academic journey through fine arts. Without y’all, I wouldn’t be grounded, and my life would make no sense.

Lastly, I wanna say ‘thank you’ to every coworker I’ve ever worked alongside in the chaos of BOH restaurant work over 10 years. You know who you are.

Instagram: @ubermill