Vanitas.
This series of paintings are titled after the Vanitas paintings of Dutch artists in the 17th Century which contrasted luscious displays of food with symbols of death and decay, such as a rotting piece of fruit, a fly, or a skull. They are meditations on nourishment, desire, and the inevitability of loss.
Erin Milan.
Unlike the still life paintings from which they take their inspiration, my work features figures as well as food; the juxtaposition becomes a subtle indictment of the way the female form is generally portrayed in our modern life. A through line of my career’s work is a deep valuing of the human, and especially female, body. In my paintings bodies are rendered sensitively, with equal parts honesty and tenderness. Nothing is required of them except their humanity. When desire is present in a painting, it is in the form of an intimate examination of the longings of the subject, not her desirability to the viewer. These pieces explore the ambivalence of desire, especially desires that seem bad, longings unfilled, and yearnings for things deeper than our surface lives allow.
“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
“…and always we have forgotten our former states, except in early spring when we almost remember being green again.”
Rumi, “Evolutionary Intelligence”
Erin Milan was born in a small town in Kansas. She studied painting at Azusa Pacific University, near Los Angeles. Her work has recently been exhibited at RJD Gallery in New York, the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin, and Sirona Fine Art in Palm Springs, Florida. This is her first solo exhibit in ten years, after a hiatus from painting to raise her family. Milan’s high realism figurative oil paintings explore desire, nourishment, and loss, and what it feels like to be human. She hopes her work expresses the value of the human, and especially female, form.