The Bather 1919

Kenneth Hayes Miller made this print called ‘The Bather’. It’s undated, but looking at it I get the sense that it could have been made anytime in the last 150 years. The marks here are so immediate, so intuitive. The figure is built up with these tiny, almost frantic marks, a thicket of lines that both define her form and almost dissolve it into the surrounding landscape. The texture is everything here; it’s not about a smooth, idealized nude, but about the raw, unfiltered process of seeing and translating that vision onto the plate. I'm drawn to the way the lines around her torso seem to vibrate, creating this sense of movement and life. It’s like the artist is not just depicting a bather, but also capturing the fleeting, ephemeral quality of a moment in time. You could say it's reminiscent of Degas in its approach to the figure, but there's also something uniquely personal and searching in Miller's mark-making. For me, art is about the push and pull between observation and invention.