Remy Miller

"The Wolfman"

In 1991, I happened to see the 1941 film "The Wolfman" on tv after many years.  It was and is one of my favorite films. I had already been working in a dark range of imagery and color, but seeing again this story of father/son conflict and nature gone wrong, I was moved to try to interpret it in pictures.  There were two avenues of related exploration. The first was literal.  Two of the greatest things about "The Wolfman" are the landscape sets and lighting. The later makes no sense in objective reality, but the sets are so beautiful and evocative that one doesn't question them. There are seven times in the movie that the figures walk out of the frame and we are left briefly with an empty landscape of trees, fog and strange lighting.  I stopped the film and did quick sketches of those compositions and for a year or so, I would do drawings from them before I started painting.  Some of the more finished ones would involve borders including writing, dates, images and symbols associated with the film.  This self-enforced discipline reflected my interest in painters like Frank Auerbach and Richard Diebenkorn and led to media experiments that broadened my drawing/painting skills.

The second avenue of exploration was abstract paintings that explored the emotional territory of the film.  In most cases, the trees of the "The Wolfman" sets provided imagery no matter how abstract, and led to my longest running theme in almost forty years of painting.