Rising Stars: Meet Brian and Debbie Miller

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brian and Debbie Miller.

Hi Brian and Debbie, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
We are a husband-and-wife team who became Daily Painters in March 2016. The path that led each of us to the commitment to create a small painting every day was different, so we will each share a bit of our artist origin stories.

Brian, I always considered myself an artist, from daydreaming shapes in the clouds while lying under the apple tree in our yard as a kid to drawing maps of the neighborhood and illustrating my rule book for The Animal Catchers Club (of which I was the founding and sole member), I was always using my imagination in artistic ways.

I graduated from the University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA) in 1988 with Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Animation and Film-Making and went on to have more than a 25-year career in graphic arts and web design/development. Eventually, I transitioned to more technical IT projects, which freed up my creative energies to create my own personal art. But I never considered myself a painter. And I always longed to create a consistent body of work that gave me a chance to explore my style.

Debbie, I never considered myself an artist because I didn’t have the natural ability to draw or paint. My parents, bless them, never encouraged me to do anything I wasn’t already good at – so that ruled out art, music, and sports – all the disciplines where I might have learned the value of practice in developing skill. After elementary school, I never took another art class until I started taking workshops in mixed media and expressive art in my 50’s. But even then, I still would never try to create something representational, because I lacked confidence that I could do it. But I wanted to learn.

I had read Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards, and she asserted that art was a learned skill, not something that belonged to a talented few. With that premise in mind, I signed Brian and me up for a weekend workshop taught by Lisa Daria Kennedy about painting abstract flowers. (Maybe I could paint something that looked like an abstract flower.) And that’s where we learned about the Daily Painting Movement.

Daily Painting
The Daily Painting Movement began as a way for professional artists to create and sell work outside of the traditional gallery system. Many of the early adopters painted small and sold their work online through blogs or auction sites, at price points that allowed more people to have access to original art. The Movement caught on quickly, and now thousands of artists at all skill levels from across the globe have found the value of a daily creative practice.

Kennedy and other Daily Painting enthusiasts cite many benefits, including the idea that you get better the more often you complete a process. Using Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours to mastery concept, some artists have suggested that completing 1,000 paintings is the equivalent of developing mastery in your personal painting style. We did the math. Debbie was starting this journey at age 58. If we only painted once per month, it would take over 80 years to paint 1,000 paintings. But painting once per day, we could reach the 1,000-painting milestone in less than three years. We were sold!

Our Practice
Each weekday morning, we get up at 5 am and paint a small 6″ x 6″ painting before going to our day jobs (IT for Brian, Mental Health Counseling for Debbie). We work in acrylics or oils, depending on the project and our mood. On weekends, we still paint, but we give ourselves permission to start later and maybe work on some larger or experimental pieces, in addition to our “daily squares.” We post our work on Instagram and engage with other artists who are painting and posting regularly.

Benefits of Our Daily Practice
There are so many benefits to our Daily Painting practice. Our technical skills as painters improved, as we might have expected. But there have been unexpected rewards as well.
• As a couple, we have been enriched by the time spent creating together every day.
• We find that painting the first thing shapes our days — we feel good about accomplishing a creative goal and we are starting the day off with positivity.
• We often paint flowers or everyday objects from around our home. Focusing on the beauty and specialness of commonplace things sets the tone for looking at our whole day with a sense of wonder and joy.
• Daily painting has helped cure our perfectionism. Because we paint before work, we need to wrap it up by a specific deadline. We typically have between 60 minutes and 90 minutes from start to finish. So, wherever the painting is when the alarm goes off, that is it. It has to be good enough. Tomorrow is another day, with another opportunity to paint. We have learned to live into St. Augustine’s motto: “Always we begin again.”
• The process of working through all the micro-decisions involved in a painting – color choices, editing decisions, brushwork choices, etc. – has made us more confident decision-makers in all areas of our lives.

Impacting others
Because we are passionate about the value of regular creative practice, we developed They Make Art University, an online learning platform dedicated to helping artists at all skill levels take the next step forward on their creative journey.

We created the Habit-Forming series, which so far includes three courses: Habit-Forming: Flowers, Part 1; Habit-Forming: Flowers, Part 2 (Volume, Value & Variety); and Habit-Forming: Still Life (Composition). We have had students from 5 Continents taking our courses, and finding new confidence and joy in painting.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The biggest obstacles have been those that in some ways face every creative person — time, space, distractions, and courage.

First, we had to commit the time. For us, early morning was the best fit. For night owls, we might have had to carve out time in the wee hours. But it’s taken dedication to not hit the snooze button. Fortunately, we’ve had each other for accountability, so when enthusiasm lags for one of us, the other can apply a little friendly pressure to get moving.

Second, we had to create a dedicated space for our artmaking. If we had to set up or clean up after every painting session, it would take too much energy and give us too many reasons not to paint. We evaluated our household and noticed that the family room — the largest room in our house — was organized around the TV. We asked ourselves, is the TV really the most important thing to us? We wanted “art” to be the most important thing. So we downsized our TV and moved into a smaller room, and we turned our family room into our art studio. Now we have the space to spread out and create with ease.

And of course, distractions. There are a million things competing for our attention and energy. And especially during the pandemic, we — like most people we talked to — had to choose between “chilling out” by binging on someone else’s creativity (e.g., Netflix or whatever hot new series is capturing the headlines at the moment) or being actively engaged in our own creative expression. We manage that tension by painting first thing so that no matter what comes next in the day, we’ve already invested in our best selves. Then numbing out in front of the TV at night doesn’t feel like we are cheating ourselves.

Finally, artmaking is essentially a vulnerable and risky business. Creating is personal. We aren’t doing it primarily for recognition or sales. We are doing it because some part of us is yearning to move our hands and play with paint and experience the joy of what happens next. But even when we don’t want metrics like Instagram likes or numbers of followers or sales figures to influence us, it’s hard to not notice those things. And it’s hard to not compare ourselves to others – assuming, of course, that their artwork is effortlessly produced, while we slog through our process, often filled with angst and insecurity.

Even when we are painting side-by-side, it is a lonely thing to be faced with a blank canvas and the fear that today will be the day that we figure out that we really can’t paint. It is easy to live in a scarcity mindset. So, facing all of that takes courage. It is brave to show up in front of our easels every morning. It is brave to risk posting on social media. It is brave to believe that our creative expression matters.

It is brave to trust that community is more important than competition and that we all rise together. But there is no joy without vulnerability. So, we have to choose the vulnerable path and get our brave each day.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We are studio artists, meaning that we paint from observation in our studios (versus Plein air artists, who paint outside in the landscape). Even if we paint landscapes, we work off of sketches or photos back in our studio space.

We are most known for our still life compositions — intimate collections of flowers, vases, food, or everyday objects that have meaning for us. Debbie is drawn to vintage fabrics, tableware, and clothing as a subject. Brian loves creating complex tablescapes that resemble landscapes. We both love the infinite variety, shapes, colors, and attitudes of flowers – they are a tireless source of inspiration.

One of the things we are most proud of is developing our online courses. These virtual learning experiences are lively, informative, and fun. We feel as if our students get a unique blend of two instructors who have different but complementary approaches to setting up compositions, sketching, mixing colors, using brushwork, and evaluating work.

It’s been such a privilege to know that our students have gained confidence and skills as a result of working with us. And we have learned so much from the process of teaching.

Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
We have been fortunate to find mentors through classes that we have taken, where we have formed relationships with other artists who provide ongoing peer mentoring and encouragement. From time to time, we have entered into paid mentoring relationships with the instructors who impacted us the most.

For us, the art community on Instagram has been the most consistent source of inspiration, encouragement, and feedback. In the Instagram realm, we try to be as committed to providing feedback to other artists as we are to checking our own feeds and stats. In fact, Debbie typically participates in #the100dayproject on Instagram, where artists are encouraged to find a repeatable creative task that they will pursue for 100 days and document their experience. Debbie’s chosen project for 2022 is #100daysofencouragement, where each day she will choose another artist to highlight, paint something inspired by them or their work, and invite people to like, follow, and/or message that artist to offer encouragement.

Locally in the Orlando area, the Crealdé School of Art and the Maitland Art Institute are good places to find in-person classes, workshops, and opportunities to meet more experienced artists who can provide valuable help to aspiring and experienced creatives. Art shows in Central Florida, such as the Winter Park Sidewalk Art Festival, the Mount Dora Art Festival, and the Gasparilla Art Festival (Tampa), are other great ways to meet artists and potentially forge creative friendships.

Contact Info:

• Email: theymakeart@gmail.com
• Website: www.theymakeart.com
• Instagram: @brianmillerart @debbierosemiller

Image Credits
Brian Miller and Debbie Rose Miller