Harland Miller
Paints enormous Penguin book covers with titles that were never published.
Harland Miller was born in York in 1964, studied at Chelsea, and is a novelist as well as a painter — Slow Down Arthur, Stick to Thirty was published in 2000. The paintings that made his name enlarge the dust jacket of a vintage Penguin paperback to wall scale, faithfully worn and foxed, with the title replaced by a phrase of his own: bleak, funny, usually about disappointment and often naming a northern English town. Later series have used Pelican covers, International Klein Blue, and letterforms treated as abstract painting. He is represented by White Cube.
This market has two clearly separated tiers and they are constantly confused. The unique paintings, in oil on canvas at large scale, lead it. Beneath them is a very large output of editions — screenprints and etchings published in runs of about fifty to three hundred, frequently in several colourways of the same title, and released through timed sales — where colourway, edition size and whether a sheet is signed and numbered in pencil set the value. Fading is the principal condition risk, since the flat colour fields show it immediately.
If you own a work by Harland Miller
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.