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Elizabeth Miller
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Des Moines |
interviewed 6-9-1998 | painting |
artwork
2008 update
interview clips
| Elizabeth Slaughter Miller was born in 1929 in Lincoln, Nebraska. She grew up in the Lincoln area with a brother and a sister and her parents. At the University of Nebraska, she was president of the Delta Phi Delta, the honorary art association, and graduated in 1951 with a B.F.A. in painting and printmaking. After a summer teaching art at a girls' camp in Minnesota, she worked at the Des Moines Art Center and in Waterloo. | She taught art at Drake University in Des Moines, where she met her husband, a music professor. They were married in 1958, and they have two daughters. She earned her M.F.A. from Drake in 1969. Before retiring in 1995, she taught painting and drawing at Iowa State University for 24 years, earning the title of Distinguished Professor. She paints in oil and watercolor. |
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| Fen Grasses copyright © 2007 Elizabeth Miller All Rights Reserved |
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| Wheat Fields copyright © 2007 Elizabeth Miller All Rights Reserved |
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| Winter Grasses copyright © 2005 Elizabeth Miller All Rights Reserved |
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| To the Savanna copyright © 2006 Elizabeth Miller All Rights Reserved |
| Drawing
(32 sec.) |
Art
as calling
(32 sec.) |
Landscape (55 sec.) |
Watercolor
& oil
(33 sec.) |
Advice
(30 sec.) |
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 (221KB) |
(222KB) |
(375KB) |
(224KB) |
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I loved drawing. I started drawing when I was just a tiny child. At family reunions all my cousins say they remember I would sit around drawing and making portraits of people. And that was my favorite thing to do. I think my family thought I was wasting time and off to myself, you know, and not involved. But when I was in junior high, I was going to Saturday art classes at the University—there was sort of a scholarship program. And so that kind of satisfied my need to draw, and encouraged my parents to let me draw and do what I wanted to do with drawing.
In high school, I was president of the Y Teens, and went to the convention in Omaha the summer before my senior year, and Katie Faulkner was a professor, our painting teacher at the University of Nebraska, and she was a speaker there. And that was just about the most awesome thing—what happened to me just to hear her talk. And she talked about art as if art is a calling, that you really—you have a calling, and there's nothing else you can do about it. You have to do it. And I think I sort of always have lived that.
I have really kind of limited the work I do the last, say, twenty years to landscape. Because I started becoming very, very interested in the natural landscape. I did a Faculty Improvement Leave to visit natural landscapes all over the state and did a lot of research, studying the prairies and the natural formations of the rocks and the rivers and everything, and spent a year doing that. And from that point on, I have really kind of limited everything I do to sort of natural landscapes. It's a great desire. It probably is boring to other people, to have me keep painting the prairies and things like that over and over and over again. But that's what I'm interested in.
I think watercolor is a lot harder than oil. But I get pleasure out of doing both, because watercolor is such a surprise. You never know what you're going to get until you start working it. And it starts telling you what it wants to do. Oil you can control just a bit more, keep building up, changing your mind. They just do such different things—it's like just two different experiences. I continue to do both. Watercolor, I just keep wanting to get better! I just keep trying to conquer it.
Don't even think about it unless you just want to do it more than anything else. There's too much work involved in it, if you're really going to pursue it, too many heartbreaks if you can't take it, and you have to do it in spite of that. And just keep trying to constantly be developing. It's not an easy life, if you think of ease as being accepted and making money, things like that, because it just takes a long, long time before you make any money from it at all.
