Hates Outta Date - Blue

Harland Miller (born 1964 in Yorkshire, England) is a British artist and writer whose practice combines painting, literature, typography and popular culture. Best known for his paintings and prints based on the graphic language of vintage book covers, Miller uses fictional titles, wordplay and dark humour to explore the relationship between image and text. He lives and works in London. Books and language have played a central role in Miller's work throughout his career. Growing up in Yorkshire during the 1970s, he developed an early fascination with literature and the particular humour of northern England. During the 1980s and 1990s, he lived and worked in cities including New York, New Orleans, Berlin and Paris, absorbing influences from Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting. Miller began experimenting with the visual identity of Penguin books in the early 1990s. These works appropriate the familiar layout, typography and colour bands of classic Penguin dust jackets while replacing the original titles with phrases invented by the artist. Humorous, melancholic, provocative or deliberately ambiguous, these titles allow Miller to bring together his interests in writing and painting while exploring the immediate power of words within an image. Alongside his visual practice, Miller has established himself as a writer. His first novel, Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty, was published in 2000 and received critical acclaim. In 2002, he was Writer in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Literature has continued to inform his artistic practice, with references ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to the physical and emotional histories embodied by old books. Over time, Miller has expanded beyond his celebrated book-cover works to develop series centred on individual letters and short words. These paintings explore typography not simply as a carrier of meaning but as a visual form in itself. His Letter Paintings, for example, combine bold graphic structures with painterly abstraction, while retaining the humour, ambiguity and linguistic play characteristic of his earlier work. Humour is fundamental to Miller's practice, but it often coexists with darker themes including love, loneliness, psychology, nostalgia and the passage of time. His works frequently operate on two levels: the viewer first reads the words almost instinctively and then encounters the painting as an arrangement of colour, texture, typography and form. Miller's work has been exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including York Art Gallery, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and White Cube in London, Paris and Hong Kong. His distinctive fusion of painting and language has made him one of the most recognisable British artists working with text today.