Oil and Ink

- Brent Philips-White -

Oil and ink are both passions of artist, Joshua Miles, whose paintings and woodcuts have been on regular display at the Prince Albert Gallery for the past three years. Oil being the medium of his paintings, mostly Karoo landscapes where he combines bold application of paint to create evocative images of our countryside, capturing the depth of the land with the interplay of light and shadow and the intensity and subtlety of the evening and morning light.

The ink component comes in the reduction block woodcuts which he has an absolute passion for and which he painstakingly produces. Carving into soft wood, applying the first dark layer of printers ink, hand printing on to paper, cleaning the ink from the wood, carving the next layer of the image, applying the next lighter shade of ink to the wood, setting the wood block with exactly the correct register over the first part of the image. This process is repeated over and over again until the lightest shade has been applied and the complete image reveals itself.

A frequent visitor to Prince Albert, passionate about the vast landscapes and huge skies we are blessed with, Joshua Miles’s exhibition, which opens at the Prince Albert Gallery on Good Friday, will combine these three passions. He will be showing paintings of our local landscapes twinned with woodcuts of the same scene.

Joshua has been honing his craft since completing his studies in Fine Art at UCT. He lives with his Scottish wife, Angela and five year old son Fred at the burgeoning artists enclave of Baard-skeerderbos.