CHOOSE ANOTHER REVIEW
TUESDAY, AUGUST 15, 1995 - VlNEYARD GAZETTE, MARTHA'S VINEYARD, MAGallery Show Is Study in Contrasts
By NIS KILDEGAARD
.....This week's show at the Granary Gallery also highlights the paintings of Steve Mills, one of which proved to be the undisputed sight-gag of the gallery's summer seson. It's entitled "A Corner of the Vineyard", and in the finest tromp l"oeil tradition it looks for all the world like an actual cork bulletin board festooned with little pieces of Island summer life -- an SSA schedule, an All Star Video card, a Mink Meadows greens ticket, an invitation to Eisenstaedt's 95the birthday party. Many gallery visitors mistook it for an actual bulletin board until they got up close.
Mr. Mills is a master of photo-realism, which could also be described as paintings of pictures of things. In fact, his paintings reproduce his photographs so well that they often end up saying as
Consider his painting entitled Daylilies, for example: The flowers bloom in the foreground, dazzling yellow in the sunlight, while the background of a stone wall and country path is thrown into soft focus. Focus, in a painting? It makes you stop and think. Or look at two adjacent paintings, Racing Into Edgartown and a smaller one entitled Sketch. They could have been painted from adjacent frames on a single roll of film.
The paintings of Steve Mills would be far less enjoyable if he were anything less than a skilled photographer with an artist's eye. His paintings are a wonder for most viewers, and the question often asked in amazement is, How does he do that? The irony is that Mr. Mills could probably give you a far more thorough description of his artistic process than could, say, an artist like James Mitchell or Lois Mailou Jones. And although his transcriptions of the sunlight glinting off the ocean waves have a photo-finish perfection, the guess here is that Mr. Mitchell, who has translated the motion Of the waves directly into the strokes of his brush, has the deeper knowledge of the subject.