Artist Gigi Mills with her dog

GIGI MILLS is a visual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

BLUE RAVEN GALLERY

Hi Gigi, thank you for speaking with me today. To start our conversation, can you tell me a bit about your creative practice?

GIGI MILLS

When I work, I don't have a plan for the piece, whether it's ceramic or whether I'm painting. I may sometimes have an idea, but it almost always gets thrown out. For instance, I started working on a swimmer for you guys. I suppose in a sense that's an idea, but I have to let it be whatever it wants to be. I can't guide it with my brain too much, or I hate it and then I end up painting over it. I destroy a lot of work: if I don't like it, it doesn't leave my studio—and even sometimes, if something doesn't sell and it comes back to me, I'll have another look at it. Sometimes I've been wrong, I think, and I’ve destroyed it. I don’t destroy anything out of anger. It’s just—it’s the past, and so I'm not interested in it anymore. 

Up until last year, I've been selling, like, two hundred pieces a year. So to make two-hundred pieces a year—first of all, I was exhausted. And that's been going on for probably about ten years straight: between seventy and two hundred paintings. I don't collect the work—I don't keep it. I mean, I don't even have any to keep. But even if I did, I wouldn't put it on my wall. I don't want to look at it because I don't want to be influenced by the past. I want to keep them going forward. 

I do work in series. For instance, the largest series was the Laundry series, and it was probably the most popular series. And now it's probably been, I don't know, six or seven or eight years since I've done one. But it's a conversation, right? And you do it until the conversation's finished. It doesn’t mean it’s not revisited occasionally—we revisit conversations that we've left when something new happens about it. In fact, one of my galleries needed a print of one of the Laundry pieces, and so I had the print made, and I looked at it, and I went, ‘Oh my God, that is so beautiful. Maybe I'll try another Laundry and see what happens, and how it comes out.’ So maybe another conversation will begin. There's always something different about it, but it is part of the same conversation.

Most of my series are much smaller than that, though. Some of them are only three. Some are ten or fifteen or twenty.

Gigi Mills

Table / Stick and Lobster / Color Shadows

Oil on Book Board / Mounted on Birch Panel, 7" x 11"

8.5" x 12.5" Framed

BRG

I’m intrigued by how you’re framing a series as a conversation—and also by how you're destroying work along the way. Can you speak more about how that act of destroying work plays into that larger question of knowing when a painting does feel really right and complete?

GM

The answer to how do I know if it's working, and how do I know when it's done is basically the same answer. A little esoteric, I guess, because it's in my solar plexus. It's very bodily, but I get a message—and I know that sounds very woo-woo. I don't get a spoken message: I feel it. I just feel it. I feel it in my solar plexus, I feel it as I'm working.

My process is not very smooth—I will argue with the work. Here's something I call the “Theory of the Three Inches”. I might start a painting—I do a lot of sixteen by twenties, eighteen by twenty-fours. So let's say I start—and this is always a mistake, and I know it as I'm doing it—a little section. And I go, ‘Oh my God, that's genius’, and I start working around that section. And it gets worse, and it can take me days because I refuse to give up those three inches, because it's so beautiful in my mind. Eventually I just have to paint over the three inches. It has to go away, or at least change dramatically. And then, all of a sudden, I realize—oh, it’s cohesive now, and all I really needed to do was kill the baby.

Gigi Mills

Laundry / Five Red Clothespins

Oil on Linen, 20" x 16"

28" x 24" Framed

BRG

I understand your background is in the performing arts and dance. I’d love to hear how you found your way from that world to the world of painting. What attracted you to the medium of painting in the first place, and what holds your attention about it? 

GM

Well, I'll start very early on first. I grew up in a circus family, and nobody was very present. Literally from four-years-old I was left alone a lot during the daytime, and left to my own devices. In fact, when I was four and five—it was a tent show and everybody's working, and so nobody's watching me—I'd be wandering around. I would go in with the elephants and lay down, just go in with them. I was fine. I was perfectly safe. I knew I was safe there. But my mother got in all this trouble because the other people on the show were worried.

One thing that my mother did that I always remember: I was eight or nine, and we were in some mall somewhere, and we went past an art supply store. She bought me oil paints at eight-years-old, and about five small canvases. I remember painting a horse on one of them. I don't remember what the others were, who knows where they are now. But I'm sure that something in me was saying, ‘This is where you need to be at some point.’ 

But I went through all this stuff. Got married, got divorced, came back to Santa Fe and decided I wanted to get my Master's in Fine Art—but I didn’t want to have to go back and draw apples, you know, for a semester. So I got my Master's in Choreography, which appears in spatial relationships. But I never got color theory. For a lot of years, and even when they were selling very well, my work was gray. It was gray with one little pop of color in there sometimes, and sometimes not. And somehow I've taught myself color—I still don't understand fully. I don't know what colors go together, what don’t go together—I'm not one of those artists. I just work from intuition.

Gigi Mills

Blue Circus

Oil, Paper, Crayon, & Ink on Paper, 9" x 20.5"

18.75" x 30.5" Framed

BRG

The color in your work is so intentional and specific—it was one of the first things that excited me about your paintings. You approach it with such sensitivity and nuance. I read in your artist statement that you think of color as “emotional anchors”. Could you expand on that, and generally on your approach to color?

GM

I believe, if I'm remembering, that scientists have done studies on color and how it affects us. We know that color—seeing a certain color—will bring up a memory for us, or emotion. And this is what I think happens . . . I can't back this up by science, because I'm not sure if I came up with this, or if somebody else came up with this, but I do a lot of layering of paint—and this is why I think it's so important for me to be painting in oil paints instead of acrylics. We can go back to that a minute. But you gesso the piece, right? You lay a few layers of gesso down on the panel or whatever, your canvas. And then you lay a layer of color, and maybe another layer of color. Deliberate, full color, right? And then maybe you just start painting whatever you're painting. And as you go along, those colors change—or, as I go along, those colors change. The pants were brown, now they're ochre, now they're green or whatever, right? Until I get to the right color, and until I get to the right mix of colors on top of colors, because each of those colors . . . When we look at a painting, oil reflects light, and acrylic absorbs light. Oil reflects. So the light hits the canvas, and it will move through each layer of paint until it hits that gesso. And the Masters painted gesso in a striated fashion so that it did this exact thing: so it bounced back at your eye. And then I believe that when that light comes back at your eye, it brings every single one of those colors with it. So let's say whatever stands out the most—I don't know what color is going to affect you and your brain, but there may be a color there that sparks an emotion, or a memory, or just some feeling, or some sense of connection.

Gigi Mills

Bird Dog / Red Violin

Oil on Linen, 15.5" x 11.5"

22.75" x 18.75" Framed

BRG

Are there artists or movements that have been particularly influential on your practice? 

GM

Well, early on, I couldn't get enough Avery. Could not get enough Avery, and his use of color. And I swear to God, and I've not read this anywhere, but the first time I saw his work in person—which was years and years ago now—I swear he was painting with a shitload of turpentine. And I also do that. I used to do it more than I do it now, but I still paint with a good amount of turpentine. But that’s why a lot of those oils look like watercolors—it has to be turpentine.

But also Rothko. When I stand in front of a Rothko, I feel like somebody has hit me in my solar plexus, like punched me in my solar plexus. I've embarrassed myself more times than I can count in museum galleries. I'll start to sob—uncontrollably sob at the work. I'm so attached to it.

There are several others. Really, more dead guys—I'm trying to think of somebody living whose work I really respect and love. I have work that I like, and I have artists that I like that are living artists, but I'm really a throwback. 

BRG

To return to that play of solitude and connection that’s present in your work—when I look at your paintings, the isolation I experience is like being at night. It holds that quiet intimacy of night, when you feel both very much alone, but also like every single person in the world is alone with you in the same darkness. Both alone and together. Can you speak on that sense of solitude in your work? 

GM

They’re more of okay now, I think, than earlier pieces, because I have had a lot of isolation in my life. I think everything we do as artists—actually, I think in some ways everything we do, no matter what it is we do in life—we're all recreating ourselves somehow. And, as artists, I think they're all self-portraits. Whether you're sculpting animals or not, somehow it's a self-portrait. But that’s the connection between everything that I believe in.

BRG

So your compositions are all drawn from you—your history, and your life—in kind of a self-portraiture lens. 

GM

Yes. And I think they’ve gotten less . . . the isolation has more a sense of ‘it’s okay’ now than it used to.

BRG

It feels that way—like a comforting quiet, not an overbearing quiet. Chosen rather than forced.

GM

‘It's okay.’

BRG

I'm thinking now about the sculpture we have at the gallery. What is your relationship between painting and working with ceramics like? How you navigate both in your practice?

GM

Okay, I’ll go back again, a little bit. So with painting two hundred pieces a year, ongoing—or even before that, when it was still like 150 a year, going back thirty years. My painting studio became a very highly stressful place for me. And one day I just realized, I need to something else. Create something else that's not a painting for a minute. I had no intention of doing it to sell—I needed to play again. I needed to find that place where it was not forced upon me, and nobody was demanding pieces—because they were all demanding work from me, constantly. Daily. It was too much. And so, again, I just sort of got the message—clay! If you want to play, go get some clay.

We had an amazing, iconic, ceramic studio workshop here in Santa Fe. You could take classes, you could rent a studio space and just work there, whatever. I knew nothing about clay, so first I took a hand-building class. Well, first I took a wheel throwing class, and I went, ‘Oh, I hate this. This is not me.’ And then I took a hand-building class. She was a wonderful teacher, and we're still very good pals. And the whole time she was teaching, I'm sitting there smooshing, just smooshing the clay, right? And she's teaching different techniques—slab building and coiling, and I would try each one. And pinch potting. And I’d try each one and be like, ‘No, that doesn't work for me.’ I'm going back, you know, I'm smooshing. And then we'd try the slabs. I was like, ‘No, I'm going to smoosh.’ And the next thing I would know, there would be something. Again, they were small pieces. They weren't great, but they felt good to do. They felt so good. 

I wood-fire everything. And I don't like glazes. I will use little bits of glazes on things, but I like the wood, and I love the what the ash does. That dog you’re getting, that gold and green gold is all ash. It’s the kiln, and where it’s placed in the kiln, and how much ash it got. I tend to be sort of lucky that way.

So in the ceramic studio, I remember how to play. How to allow things—how to allow my painting—to come more easily again, which is how it all started in the first place. But under pressure we get away from our beginnings, and it's too bad. So clay still does that for me. It's an important place for me to still have time to play. Most of my time is spent in my painting studio; I spend right now one day a week working on ceramics. And then sometimes I'll go in the afternoon and if I have time, and if I need to work on something before it dries out completely. 

Gigi Mills

Tennis / Green Ball

Oil on Linen, 20" x 16"

27" x 23" Framed

BRG

I have one final question for you today, Gigi, and hopefully this will be a playful one to continue with that theme of play. If you imagine yourself at a dinner party that’s populated by artists, both living and dead, who would you like to have seated close to you? And is there something you’d like to say to them, or ask them?

GM

Well of course I’d like Rothko on one side and Milton Avery on the other. And I wouldn’t be able to say a word to either one of them. I don’t know—I’d just soak up their energy, I think. Because otherwise I’d be so afraid of asking a really dumb question. Or making a really dumb comment about their work, which I just love so much. But who else? Henry Moore, too. And, you know, he’s gone also. I can only think of those three right now. 

BRG

That sounds like a wonderful, intimate dinner to be at. Thank you so much, Gigi, for your time and generosity today. It’s been a pleasure. 

Gigi Mills

Diver / Blue Violet

Oil on Birch, 24" x 18"

30.75" x 24.75" Framed

GIGI MILLS is a visual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, represented by Blue Raven Gallery.

MORGANNE ELKINS is a painter and writer from Midcoast Maine. She serves as Blue Raven Gallery's editor and artist liaison.