Harland Miller’s Letter Paintings are visually witty—bold, brash, and laced with northern humour that makes you laugh before you’ve even processed why.
XXX, the first book dedicated solely to this celebrated series, dives deep into Miller’s obsession with language, isolating letters and acronyms into vibrant, hard-edged icons that hum with Pop Art energy and medieval gravitas.
XXX is a glimpse into Miller’s world, featuring over 100 works alongside intimate studio shots that reveal the artist at work and play. His Letter Paintings—ACE, LUV, UP—distil language into its most primal form, where colour and composition carry as much weight as the words themselves. A neon-bright XXX (2023) fractures into layered translucency, like a stained-glass window remixed by Ed Ruscha. Another piece, all rounded with saturated hues, nods to Jasper John, the illuminated manuscripts of monks and the roadside signage of Americana.
Tim Marlow, a seasoned voice in contemporary art, unpacks Miller’s fusion of high and low culture with the clarity of a curator who’s spent decades decoding visual language. Meanwhile, Hettie Judah—whose writing is insightful—traces the lineage of these works, from their roots in Miller’s literary past to their place in today’s image-saturated world.
Behind the playful surfaces lies a more profound meditation on how we read and see and how a well-placed letter can feel like a gut punch or a wink. Whether you’re a longtime fan or new to Miller’s world, this book reminds you that sometimes, the most straightforward words leave the loudest echoes.
Harland Miller: The Alchemist of Words and Colour
Born in Yorkshire in 1964, Miller’s childhood was shaped by the bleak industrial landscapes of 1970s Britain—a world of power cuts and the looming shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper. Yet, amid the gloom, books and humour became his refuge. “Where I grew up, life was carnage,” he recalls. “But laughter was the relief valve.” This darkly comic sensibility threads through his work, from his early wanderings across New York, Berlin, and Paris—where he embraced the persona of ‘International Lonely Guy’—to his later fusion of Pop Art bravado with the introspective depth of Abstract Expressionism.
Miller’s art is a dance between the sacred, sardonic, profound, and playful. Whether riffing on self-help manuals or medieval scripts, he reminds us that words, like paint, are never static—they shift, surprise, and sometimes, like a well-timed joke, save us from the dark. – PCR 2025
Harland Miller lives and works in London. Harland Miller XXX Published by Phaidon
Buy This Book Here