Brent Millar was born in Edinburgh in 1950. He trained at Edinburgh College of Art from 1968 to 1972. After a time spent travelling around Europe and an even longer spell teaching at art colleges in the south of England, he returned to the city in the early 1990s. Today, Brent works from his home and studio in Stockbridge.

It would be a mistake to assume, even from such cursory biographical details, that Brent’s work is bound to the tradition of genteel Edinburgh painting. True, his paintings have more than a flavour of the Edinburgh School, but there is no evidence of middle-class repression in his work. His paintings roar; they assault the senses. In the breadth of his practice, the directness of his approach and his passionate love of the natural world, Brent is responsible for a fabulously spirited body of work which bursts with a sense of joie de vivre, always tied to sensation and experience. In any exhibition of Brent’s work, one will find much, much more than the sort of highly refined, “respectable” still lifes and landscapes painted to suit Edinburgh’s drawing rooms.

As Brent intimated to me when I visited him at home, the biographical facts of an artist’s life can sometimes distract rather than reveal. As such, this text offers no neat, straightforward study of the man and his art. Instead, it hopes to mine deeper into the essence of Brent’s life and work by getting to grips with the creative spirit which drives it all; by considering those worlds he creates, both in his own home and in his artworks, to throw light on the powerful, complex, underlying current which binds art and life together.

If asking an artist about the relationship between art and life is a rather lazy way to start an interview, it is surely much worse that, sitting with Brent Millar in the kitchen of his Edinburgh home, I knew his answer before I asked the question: Brent’s home speaks for him.

Brent – and he is always simply “Brent”, as in the signatures in his paintings - has built a creative haven in his home and studio over the course of 19 years. It might be a Gesamtkunstwerk: a German word which translates literally into English as “total work of art” and into Scots, perhaps, as “gallimaufry”. This assault on the senses can be defined somewhere in the space between Dickensian curiosity shop and Mardi Gras parade. There are pictures and plants, casts and coals, pond yachts and stuffed animals, ceramic pots and frying pans. Brent is the creator of a beautiful and bewildering sort of alchemy which flies in the face of fashion: every time he dusts the unplumbed toilet which sits in his living room window, Lawrence Llewlyn-Bowen shudders and doesn’t know why.

Brent, astonished by artists who live and work in bare, pedestrian homes, has built a world which closely reflects and also enriches his irrepressible creative spirit. Here, there is no room for anything contrived or ostentatious. The objects in his home have not been chosen to honour any sort of decorative scheme. The fact that everything just works has less to do with a penchant for offbeat interior design and all to do with the invisible hand which guides Brent’s creativity. These objects are not to be found arranged in self-consciously artful still lifes, composed to impress the visitor. The teacups and milk jugs on his kitchen shelf are not bunched together and turned inwards, as if speaking to themselves: rather, these objects sing aloud. If an artist can transform a painting with a couple of strokes, then one has the impression that a given room will appear to transform beyond recognition if Brent swaps a few objects around: such is the power of their presence. When he needs inspiration, he takes a look around, finding himself stirred by colour, shape, texture, weight; the qualities which rouse the senses and have him reaching for brush, pencil, pastel or clay. Brent has shaped this inhabitable work of art, and it shapes him too. He feeds his own creative spirit; it nourishes him.

As Brent told me when I visited him at home, he couldn’t bear to work in any other way or in any other place, or indeed to share his working space with others. His comments seem to ring true for an artist who has gained a reputation as a singular force on the periphery of the Scottish art scene. Brent couldn’t bring himself to follow in the footsteps of his teachers at Edinburgh College of Art, having no desire for the sinecure of a teaching career, a cosy and profitable relationship with a commercial gallery or election to the Royal Scottish Academy. He could surely have achieved all of these accolades had he wanted them: his teaching experience is extensive and his love for students considerable, and he has shown himself capable of producing work in the sort of suitably polite, quasi-academic manner which might endear him both to an Edinburgh gallery and the Academy. It is telling that Sir Robin Philipson himself acquired one of Brent’s pictures, a fine drawing of a dead hare, when the artist was a young man. It still hangs alongside work by Elizabeth Blackadder, John Houston and William Gillies in the Philipson family’s collection. But Brent doesn’t really feel at home in such company.

Brent’s paintings may indeed have more than a flavour of the Edinburgh School, but there is no evidence of middle-class repression in his work. Here, the beautiful frames – and Brent is very particular about the frames he chooses – do not figure as attempts at commercial enticement; instead, they appear as pictorial lassos, straining to control the force which stirs inside. His best paintings appear to have an active and untamed life of their own. Technically speaking, this is in part because Brent, like the painters of the Edinburgh School, delights in the myriad qualities of surface texture; but unlike many of his predecessors at Edinburgh College of Art, who might capture a blade of grass with the flick of a wrist, Brent will use the whole arm. Paint is slathered onto the canvas with a fully loaded brush; it is smeared and smudged, mixed and modulated; he flattens it, fattens it, scrapes it away or leaves it to run in rivers. Or he pats the paint on in spare little spots, manipulates it carefully or leaves it to speak for itself in its dazzling purity. Unlike some of the polite flower paintings of the Edinburgh School, Brent’s flowers do not appear to have been pressed within the pages of a book and laid out for interrogation; his flowers are painted with an energy which makes his monumentally-sized tulips loom large with a living presence, stretching the nostrils and biting at the eyes. The result of such a vigorous and confident touch is clear in works like Spiritual Insight, in which Brent describes the fragility of little daisies which rest either side of the boy’s head as well as hardy-looking anemones, which pop out of the painting like piercing eyes; the same speed and surety evident in each different mark helps to bind the whole image together, the artist’s touch holding sway.

Brent Millar, Spiritual Insight, oil on canvas, 160cm x 160cm, private collection.

Mark-making is central to Brent’s work, and if the effect has a strong decorative appeal, this is not coincidental; however, such an effect lies literally on the surface. He achieves something beyond a mere stylist. He works intuitively and impulsively, carried by technical skill, to achieve an accomplished and visually absorbing portrayal of painterly equivalents for the forces which, as Brent himself likes to put it, “set the heather alight”. In Brent’s work, the exciting, tactile qualities of the material itself appeal to the viewer for an immediate sensual response. His mark-making figures as an expression of his own lived experience; the paint pulses with life. Brent does not aim to literally re-present elements of his own life in paint – he is not out to tell his story – but by celebrating the material’s expressive potential, he uses it as a vehicle for communicating real-life sensation, emotion and experience in a distinct language. As his best paintings demonstrate, when something of the sensual world we all know (and which the artist himself feels deeply) is expressed in the painterly arena – in the hard facts of paint on canvas - it can somehow appear all the more real. On this point, Brent defers to Peter Lanyon, who put it simply in saying that “paint represents experience and makes it actual”.

Brent discovered early on that his experience of life could find apt expression in the art of painting. Long spells spent in the Borders countryside as a boy in the 1950s allowed him to observe and understand natural creation and growth, find pleasure in physical sensation and meaning in stirring emotional currents. Brent’s senses were stimulated by the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feels of the natural world. As a boy, he drank in something of this richness, stirring a love of sensuality in all its forms which is plain to see today in both his art and his life. His art is tied inextricably to nature and natural forces; and a clear sensitivity to the sensual world is part and parcel of his daily existence. Brent still takes pleasure in the sensual, wherever he finds in his home: he is sensitive to the smell of flowers he has collected, to the texture of old leather suitcases bought many years ago, perhaps even to the pleasingly glossy glaze of an old mixing bowl (he has a collection of dozens). Curiously for a visual artist, it becomes clear in conversation that Brent does not value his visual sense above the others. When he recalls the time he took a trip with his grandfather to the home of a family friend who kept canaries (a recurring theme in his art), he does not dwell on the visual but instead speaks about this experience as the day his olfactory gland was uncorked. When he speaks about his late friend Elaine, his first instinct is to describe the smell of her perfume. In a large unfinished painting dedicated to Elaine, I sense that her likeness is secondary to the importance of the broad, pale marks which float around the face, which lend an almost ethereal effect. But more than this, the energy and spontaneity in Brent’s handling reveal in no uncertain terms that the language of painting can, in his hands, stimulate a direct and affecting response, evocative as scent.

Brent Millar, Growing Amongst Cornflowers, oil on canvas, 90cm x 60cm, private collection.

The question of how to represent powerful lived experience in artistic terms – how to breathe life into art – is at the core of the instinct for mark-making evident in Brent’s mature paintings. This concern prompted him to follow the example of the American Abstract Expressionists – a world away from the Edinburgh School – to incorporate screenprinted imagery into his work. Since the 1970s, Brent has used oil paint applied through homemade screen stencils to invest his paintings with passages of striking figurative detail, creating a fusion which is as distinctive as it is, at its best, genuinely rousing. In these works, the dialogue between artist and experience is at its most intimate. In each long, languorous stroke and quick, deft daub, we sense a charge of energy which ignites real sensation in us, the viewer. When the brush licks the canvas then springs away, it leaves a sharp tail of curled paint which hardens like the hair on the nape of the neck. When the minute dots of paint are transferred through the stencil onto canvas, they might read like a network of open pores. Brent’s mark-making riffles the viewer’s senses. In his art, we have the sense of a physical experience: the boundary between art and life seems to dissolve.

In Brent’s art, the pools of screenprinted detail become more than simple visual counterpoints to the vigorous brushstrokes; more than interludes in a great, spirited concerto. He manages to achieve a synthesis between these different sorts of marks, deepening the visual fascination of the picture plane and hinting at a deeper meaning without compromising the robustness of the overall work. In Nasturtiums, for example, the brushstrokes seem to complement the image of the embracing lovers. The freedom of the brushed paint transforms flowers into a scheme which recalls the pattern of dappled sunlight, filtered through trees; a visual sensation entirely appropriate to the printed image of the lovers, whose bodies are hugged and defined by the effects of strong sunlight. The hot, high-key colour further binds the imagery together, expressing a very pervasive sense of atmosphere charged with sexual urgency.

Brent Millar, Nasturtiums, oil on canvas, 50cm x 70cm, private collection.

This synthesis is also apparent in Painting for Stephen, a richer and altogether more ambitious work. Here, the printed areas are veiled with under- and over-painting so that for all their matter-of-fact clarity, the images of a homestead, a youth, a flower, become absorbed into the wider composition. Perhaps ironically, the areas which might appear at first glance to represent calm oases of clear, recognisable detail actually lead the eye deeper into the wilds of the painting: the standardised process of printing actually complements the sense of visual excitement. In a Brent Millar painting, the eye is allowed no time to rest.

Brent revels in the sensual world and he takes genuine delight in mark-making, but his paintings are never self-indulgent or simply hedonistic; they strike deeper than this. True, his paintings are often very beautiful, bursting with a sense of joy tied to his personal experience of the world’s richness and the sensations provoked. He presents this feast in paint, appealing to our senses to express the stuff of life in art, and the effect is sometimes overwhelming. The paintings can become storms of riotous, discordant colour. His mark-making becomes frenetic, stretching the bounds of figuration. Flowers melt into loose, amorphous shapes and meld with imagery in unexpected ways. Sometimes, particularly in Brent’s painted-and-printed works like Painting for Stephen, the effect of his touch mines mysterious depths, appearing to bring a confused memory to life or to summon a disorienting spell of déjà vu. But these works never veer into the abstract realm: they dazzle the viewer with a sense of what is real. The swipes and flicks of paint stress a physical reality; so physical that Brent’s paintings threaten to overflow with matter. The question of finding a means to channel life into art is replaced with the concern that art might spill over and invade life.

Brent Millar, Painting for Stephen, oil on canvas, 115cm x 158cm, private collection. A work commissioned by Cranfield University to commemorate the life of Stephen Regan, academic and friend of the artist.

Indeed, Brent’s art does spill out of the canvas: the artwork extends to the painting’s title, which is bound closely to the image. The close relationship between word and image is exemplified in some of Brent’s most light-hearted works. In his triple portrait of three gay friends (titled “Pansies”) or his painting of a pair of cockatoos (“One Cock or Two?”), the amusing edge of each work would be lost without the title. His often ambiguous and romantic-sounding titles - In the Windless Nights of June, Wake Together Without a Word and Hope is a Waiting Dream - deepen the essential mystery of these paintings and strengthen their charge, as if the pulse Brent wishes to convey cannot be contained within the image alone, and might be best expressed through the stimulation of the aural sense too. Brent’s address books show a natural creative impulse expressing itself through word and image in a much more instinctive way, without any of the conscious discipline which is evident in the words he has bound to an image. Looking through one well-thumbed book, drawings, photographs, prints and collages abound, many depicting songbirds, some sketched lightly, others electrified against lurid pink backgrounds. Alongside these drawings, buried underneath them or wrought over the top, are names, addresses, phone numbers, quotations and aphorisms. The number of Brent’s plumber sits alongside the inscription “please love me too”. Leafing through this book, the words and images enrich each other, sometimes supplying an unexpectedly tender and poetic flavour to the sight of a given page. The book makes sense as an object which presents the workings of Brent’s inner world in unrestrained, unselfconscious creative activity. Like so many objects in Brent’s home, his address book is a well-used, utilitarian object which, in his hands, has become an inspired work of art; and which, in turn, inspires his own daily life.

Brent Millar, Five Past Midnight, oil on canvas, 112cm x 86cm, private collection.

Brent’s sense of creativity is too deeply-felt to be held within normal, “respectable” artistic bounds. Firstly, it is important to note that his painting embraces much more than richly layered, highly charged canvases like Painting for Stephen. Some are strikingly spare and economical, as in many of his images of goldfinches, sparrows and canaries. He is the painter of portraits, figures and landscapes, as well as the wonderfully idiosyncratic: Five Past Midnight, for example, is a gently comical but more-than-slightly unsettling image of a group of owls lined up in a row, regarding the viewer with beady-eyed menace. The example of Brent’s address book helps to illustrate the breadth of his creativity further; and of course the matter within the world of his home, including a bedframe screenprinted with an image after Ian Hamilton Finlay, leaves us in no doubt about his bounding creative spirit. Brent’s creativity is instinctive and irrepressible. He understands it as a truly natural force; so “natural” that he recognises the essence of creativity in the forces, rhythms and patterns of the natural world. He remembers being struck by this feeling as a young boy, committing a very early creative act – a literally creative act – in planting seeds and watching flowers grow. Then as now, we find him acting in concert with the forces which cannot be controlled to nourish the expression of something beautiful; is there really such a difference between Brent’s planting a flower and painting an image, when that image – like the soil, the sunlight and the rain – would appear to spring directly from the stuff of life, the natural way of things? The force of nature inspires and drives Brent’s art.

As an image-maker, Brent’s practice extends far beyond painting; drawing occupies a key place in his body of work and indeed, as the source of great pleasure, in his daily life. One of Brent’s earliest memories is of his grandfather summoning the image of a dog using pencil and paper to magical effect. Today, one senses that the sheer delight Brent takes in drawing is indebted to this memory: that magic is still undimmed. A true feel for the medium of pencil on paper is clearly apparent in his early drawings. A remarkably fine pencil study of his younger brother, Kenneth, drawn with evident speed when Brent was only 16 years old, suggests a calling. A stylish portrait which perfectly captures the gaucheness of adolescence in his then 14-year-old brother, half-asleep in an armchair, it brings the drawings of a young David Hockney to mind: for such a speedy drawing, it has an incisiveness which, I would suggest, means it would not look ashamed of itself if hung in their company.

Brent Millar, Brother Kenneth, pencil on paper, 30cm x 26cm, private collection.

Over the course of his creative life, Brent’s drawing has not developed along linear lines. His drawings – whether set down on paper, canvas, the etching plate or the ceramic surface – are remarkably wide-ranging in style and subject matter, although directness and a feeling of spontaneity remain at the core of everything he does. Brent’s portrait studies, for instance, embrace many different manners: some are executed in crumbly and imprecise black pastel, suggesting the buzz of a contingent presence; others, in pen and ink, are visually stunning and show an ability to communicate a human presence with maximum visual impact. Brent’s drawings show a mastery of the medium: he exploits all of the expressive peculiarities of the pencil, the pen, the charcoal or the pastel to very pleasing effect. The drawings stand apart from the paintings as beautiful art objects in their own right – they are not produced as studies for larger works – but they share in the artist’s enduring concern to exploit the language of artistic medium to bring art ever-closer to the stuff of life.

Brent Millar, Brent Shaving On 50th Birthday, mixed media on paper, 33.5cm x 33.5cm, private collection.

Brent has never relied on a tried-and-tested drawing mode, but one particular idiom stands out as especially memorable and effective. Many of Brent’s finest drawings appear distinctly naïve, cutting to the chase with a raw, expressive line which allows him to set down the essence of a thing – whether observed or imagined – with straightforward directness. By using such an economy of means, it is as if reality has been channelled straight through the eye and via a technical shorthand towards a resolution which is at once very inventive and also surprisingly faithful. This manner is particularly effective in his drawings of birds and animals: in a few quick, unfussy lines, Brent can capture the weightlessness of a songbird or the sprightliness of a hare. The total lack of pretension in these drawings appears common to the art of children; it is fitting that Brent strives towards simple, direct but beguiling truths, straight out of the mouth of babes. Ultimately, of course, Brent draws for the same reason as a child: never out to impress a gallery or a collector, he draws for the sheer love of it.

Brent Millar, This Enigmatic Creature That Stirs Our Sense of Mystery, mixed media, 40 x 20cm, private collection.

The sense of immediacy which Brent values in his drawings is perhaps intensified in his ceramic practice. He is a capable ceramicist – his studio is full of large vessels, built up in coils – but more often than not, the ceramic surface of ready-made items like plates, pots, vases and jugs play host to his mark-making in pencil and paint. Many of the same sorts of images which appear on paper or in smaller paintings find their way onto the ceramic surface. When glazed and fired, the colours become wonderfully vibrant, bringing us closer to sensation and experience: his searing reds and burnt oranges breathe life into a large plate painted with a flock of parrots, so that this object transforms into a little round window into an aviary. The glossy sheen of the glaze on Brent’s ceramics gives certain images, such as swans swimming around the inside of a bowl, a pleasingly aqueous touch. Ceramics satisfy a special place in Brent’s practice as real, tactile, sensuous objects; the temptation to reach out and touch the surface of a painting can be satisfied here in his ceramics, made to be gripped hard. More than this, his ceramics can be used as part of everyday life: a visitor to Brent’s home will likely be offered tea in a hand-painted mug. Sitting with Brent in his kitchen, a storm in a teacup is enough to evidence – yet again – that inextricable relationship between art and life.

Brent Millar, Rooks, ceramic, dimensions unknown, private collection.

There is a further very notable element to Brent’s ceramic practice: the lifemask. Since the early 1970s, he has produced a huge number of these objects, applying plaster over the subject’s entire face (straws are inserted up the nostrils to allow for airflow) which after a time hardens to produce a mould. From this, he casts a near-enough identical likeness of the face in clay. Sometimes the masks are painted in bright, cheerful colours or – as with the lifemask he made of me – they are painted with a deathly pallor, suggesting a grave premonition. Chatting with Brent, I naively suggested that, with his masks, he might be playing with the dichotomy of life and death in an ironic sort of way: there is after all a fine line between lifemasks and deathmasks (traditionally, they are virtually indistinguishable), and to call such a ghoulish-looking object a “life” mask would surely tickle Edgar Allen Poe himself. Brent is too polite to say that nothing could be further from the truth. The notion that his lifemasks could be read as premonitions had never occurred to him. For him, the lifemasks are always positive, never negative: they are restful and contemplative. For him, they satisfy one of the chief aims which runs throughout his art: they capture what is fleeting in the most concrete terms. In his painting, Brent strives to capture sensation and present it in the physical facts of paint on canvas; his lifemasks turn a transient presence into a physical reality, which can be held and handled. It might be the ultimate affirmation of life and art.

Brent Millar, Douglas Erskine: Lifemask, ceramic, life-size, private collection.

The story of how art met life, in Brent’s case, is not clean-cut. As he says, he only knew he wanted to be an artist when he was standing in front of the career’s advisor. Brent’s sense of creativity is so instinctive that it didn’t occur to him to channel his energy towards a career or indeed to apply any sort of label to it. But in his love of art, he found a means of expressing his experience of life, and it has shaped a fabulously rich body of work, bursting with joie de vivre.

To meet the artist himself is to encounter an open, funny, sincere and humane man, who at 73 years old still delights in the sensual world he discovered as a young boy. If it is a special thing that an artist can draw on the richness of feelings experienced in childhood throughout their adult life, and derive undiminished pleasure from these even after many years, it is quite extraordinary that Brent now appears more driven than ever to give form to these feelings.

Brent’s creativity is a free-flowing, unbridled force. It bubbles over, across media and styles, and well over the top of fashion. It has the power to create whole worlds: a Brent Millar painting is a world within a frame, the force of nature distilled in paint. And indeed, Brent’s home is a world in itself: those creative currents work through his home, taking root in address books – modern illuminated manuscripts? – and bedframes, emblazoned with screenprint. The force of Brent’s creativity cannot be held within the formal bounds of art, so it flows freely in all he does, and might even form a cycle. That world within a painting, hung on his wall, appears to spill out into his home; the stuff of art is plain to see in every room in his house, a great gallimaufry which constantly inspires him. I think it is a myth that Brent lives in Stockbridge; he actually lives in a terrarium, cut off from artistic fashion, delighting in nature and feeding off his own creativity.

This is an expression – quite an apt one, I think – which can only be stretched so far. Brent, the man and his art, is not closed-off, esoteric and insular. His art is a hand extended. It is a joyous celebration of natural, sensual existence in which we can all share. If his work sometimes overwhelms with the shock of energy, it is no less joyous for that. His paintings are indeed celebrations: like all worthwhile celebrations, they’re simply not for the faint-hearted.

At the end of May 2024, Brent’s creativity is due to bubble over into a large-scale exhibition in Edinburgh. This issue of art-scot is set to coincide near-perfectly with Why Do Birds Sing, a large though short-lived show of Brent’s work in the Undercroft of St Vincent’s Chapel, straddling the border between Edinburgh’s New Town and Stockbridge. Here, the visitor is invited into Brent’s world, if only for a few days.

Chatting with Brent, who has always dodged the trap of pleasing the market, he is obviously excited by the prospect of presenting his work very much on his own terms. He is staging the exhibition on his own initiative, along with the kind support of the Chapel, which allows for the freedom to present an unfettered introduction to his work in all its variety. The selection of work on show – which presently totals around 250 individual pieces - will showcase the fruits of the full breadth of his creative energy, spanning 70 years: an image of a modern daytrip to the scene of the crucifixion, drawn when Brent was four, to an important triptych which features the artist as a modern St Francis, which Brent is completing as I write this text. Inevitably with Brent’s work, art and life will go hand in hand: when the paintings, drawings and ceramics move to the Chapel, so too will the world of Brent’s home. The stuffed birds are due to make a temporary migration to the Undercroft. He plans to take command of the space through all sorts of colourful domestic means: he speaks about dividing the space with some 20 dyed bedsheets. The invisible hand which guides Brent’s creativity will be evident everywhere, it seems.

Why Do Birds Sing promises to be a wonderfully rich and memorable experience for the artist and all those who step inside his world. It is an opportunity for an artist, happily removed from the mainstream, busily engaged and continually – and even increasingly – excited about his work, to show what he’s made of on his own terms. It promises to show the entire picture, that whole gallimaufry: art and life nourishing one another, nourishing the artist, and nourishing us, the viewers.

Douglas Erskine

With thanks to Brent Millar, Kenny Thomson and Alan Campbell.

All images copyright Brent Millar.

Why Do Birds Sing

An exhibition of drawings, paintings and ceramics

The Undercroft, St Vincent’s Chapel

St Vincent Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6SW

Viewing:

Wednesday 22nd May, 11am-8pm

Thursday 23rd May, 11am-8pm

Friday 24th May, 11am-8pm

Private view:

Saturday 25th May, 11am-4pm

Open Sunday 26th May, 12-6pm

www.brentmillar.co.uk

info@brentmillar.co.uk