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Ex Libris Gala

Jason Mills Bio

The chronology of someone who is involved in the process of creating can take many twists and turns and setbacks and restarts and distractions and switching of mediums along the way.  My timeline looks something like a younger version of myself taking apart old bicycles that I found or got for very cheap at yard sales then reassembling them with different parts to make something different.

Fast forward a few years to my discovery of clay.  It really started off with a want for a decent cereal bowl or a pie plate or do I dare say Ashtray. The utilitarian side of clay is something we have all interacted with, without really thinking about it.   Then came the discovery of the more ritual or spiritual side of clay and that was where once again I found myself taking different shapes and assembling them to create something different. Honestly, I didn’t even know what these creations meant I was just enjoying the process of assembling shapes and noticing the harmony or juxtaposition.

The current medium of choice is painting. Though I believe this was always my medium it just took some time for us to find each other.

Artist Statement

The purpose of this artist statement is for myself to give some insight on how I came up the with the title Similarities and Differences.  Hoping with a little information that you and I will have a better understanding of the ideas I had and how they came out in this creative process called painting.

The idea of Similarities and Differences came out in the Spring of 2020.  I had been hanging these large paintings on the Community Bulletin Board, that no longer exists, in Downtown White River Junction as a way for people to still look at art in real life when it wasn’t accessible. After a few weeks of this I started to put two paintings together on the bulletin board as a way to cover the whole surface.  So I was really mashing or juxtaposing two different paintings together to make one large painting and this is when I was noticing the differences but also the similarities in my own work.  This mashing or juxtaposition of paintings was so exciting to me because it was celebrating the elements that were similar between the two and it was also celebrating the elements that were different between them.

This current body of work comes from pulling together older paintings that I may have or have not fully connected with and started to put them together while adding some new marks or ideas to create something new and different.