Jeremy Miranda makes paintings. Beautifully crafted paintings. We spoke with him about the narratives that run through his work and life on the North Shore.
Hi Jeremy, please tell us a bit about yourself, your environment, and background in art?
I live on the North Shore of Massachusetts, which is about 20 minutes north of Boston. My fiancé and I were drawn to this area because of the amount of farms, salt marshes and wild life preserves in the area plus its proximity to the ocean.
I graduated with a BFA in painting from Massachusetts College of Art in 2004 and have been making my living as an artist and occasional teacher ever since.
What did you enjoy doing as a child? Did you make art, did you read?
I was always making art, but of course didn’t know it by that name. As a child I was driven by my imagination and was inventing worlds, characters and narratives. Every Christmas my grandparents would get me a big block of printing paper (the kind you can get at any office store), and I would burn through it in a few months with drawings of different characters, book ideas, landscapes, whatever interested me at the moment. Drawing didn’t become about a product until I was told
that I had a knack for it. It may sound a bit clinical but up until then, like any
child, I now realize that I drew to communicate my thoughts and to give them a tangible, visual equivalent.
Children’s books had an enormous influence on me (and still do). I read all
the Chris Van Allsburg books, Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. I had a big collection
of field guides on minerals, insects and plants. I even spent my first year at college as an illustrator with the intent of making children books, but soon gravitated towards painting.
Do you still have the guides you collected as a kid?
Regrettably, I don’t have a single one, and couldn’t even begin to guess where they ended up. Nowadays I collect things found while out on walks. Driftwood, bracket mushrooms rocks, really anything natural with a unique form. We also have a growing collection of cacti.
There is a strong visual arts culture in Massachusetts, why do you think that is?
I’m not exactly sure, I would imagine that it has a lot to do with the sheer number of colleges and universities that have art programs in addition to the only state funded art college in the country.
Iceberg Nocturne
The iceberg paintings are an ongoing theme for you. What attracts you to them as a subject?
The iceberg series really began as an experiment in variation. I wanted a template where I was free to modulate the different elements, to observe a range of differences. Constable did a similar experiment with clouds, and of course there are the Monet haystacks which these are a bit of a nod to I guess. I also like the narrative of the lonely iceberg floating in the cold sea. I think it’s interesting how quickly inanimate objects become living things in our minds.
You play with facets of the icebergs and give them a curious architectural twist in some work? How many iceberg paintings have you made now?
The faceted icebergs are meant to imitate precious stones and gems. I don’t know exactly how many icebergs I’ve painted, but I imagine its somewhere near 100, give or take. I’m actually building a new website that will display all the icebergs I’ve painted so far in a large grid.
Faceted Iceberg
You place nature inside of interiors, or sometimes there is a sneak peak to an amazing view, or displaced object, like a ladder that links the underwater world to land above in Ladder No. 2.
The ladder paintings are metaphors about transition, more specifically going from what is familiar to something “other”, or foreign. They are more or less, romantic ideas about searching in the world.
Your paintings appear part of a broader story, they are not simply a moment in time or a one-off scene.
Yes, you’re completely right each painting is a component in a broader yet loose narrative about nature, technology and searching. I’m also very interested in the craft and how the paintings come off as physical objects, this is hard to see on
the internet.
Alaska
Some of your work gives a feeling a remoteness. The icebergs obviously, but also a greenhouse floating far from land, or the interiors.
The trick with all of these paintings is that while I’m painting them I’m imagining being witness to these events; being the one person on the beach who sees the greenhouse floating, or the one person looking out seeing the lone iceberg floating, or the one person stumbling upon a greenhouse illuminated in the woods. In that way, they are not exactly about isolation so much as they are moments when we get to be alone, which is a very different thing in my mind, and the kind of discoveries one can make, much like in a dream.
Ladder No. 2
Do you get to the outdoors when not in your studio?
I try and get outdoors as much as possible but the studio can be very greedy.
It has demands that sometimes keep me indoors much longer than I’d like.
Is there a wild area, reserve or beach you would recommend a reader must visit when in your part of the world?
With out hesitation Plumb Island Bird Sanctuary on the north shore. It’s a barrier island surrounded by the ocean and salt marshes and has the distinction of being in the flight path of a multitude of migratory birds. We were lucky enough to see a snowy owl there last winter and that was very surreal.
Find Jeremy’s work here and here and here.
bakersmith 