It takes real nerve to paint flowers in the first decade of the 21st century. But flowers- along with hummingbirds, jungle landscapes and stormy skies are what he paints.
Miller has been strongly influenced by the work of the 19th century American painter, Martin Johnson Heade. This painter was associated with the luminist school of painting, whose expressive concerns, as the name suggests, were light and atmospheric effects. The influence of Heade is most apparent in Miller’s early paintings of tropical jungle scenes such as Hummingbird and Cymbidium Orchid. Painted on a small scale on metal plate, the quality of quietism and transcendental light seems to echo the preoccupations of an earlier time. Though the conventions and rhetoric of the Luminists were to influence his approach, it was his abiding interest in the light of nature which caused him to focus more and more closely on the flowers themselves. It was a focus both optical and emotional.

His paintings of flora, whether minute or heroically scaled, are extravagantly imagined - almost operatic in scope. They’re brilliantly lit, deeply shadowed, and strangely animated. Some of the blossoms are so large and close up that he arrives at a kind of abstraction, organic in character, in which any element of domesticity has been eliminated. Instead we are left with voluminous forms in which the ominous and exotic are hinted at. In The Three Calalily Blossoms, the snow-white petals are as rippled and convoluted as a flag in the wind. Posed against misty hills, the flowers seem to exist in an uncontaminated Eden. Romantic nostalgia is not tempered by any sense of postmodern irony. The flowers are transformed by the intensity of feeling which the painter manages to convey through the limpid quality of light and its effects on the translucencies of their surfaces. In the Blue and White Irises, the mysteriously shadowed concavities, the lush colours and the overall sense of opulence all contribute to a seductive aura which is deeply suggestive. Concrete in detail, but abstract as a whole, many of these botanical studies have a disquieting sensual quality underlying their frankness. Solidly tactile and comprehensible, their ambiguities and elusiveness encourage us to see these natural objects in a light in which we had not known them.