The Vancouver graphic designer had a long and varied career designing museum displays and houses, but on the side became a top maritime artist
Gordon Miller isn’t pretentious about his paintings.
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“I don’t call this art,” he said, glancing around the dozens of works in his Kitsilano studio. “It’s just illustration.”
But others beg to differ. They see the modest Miller as one of the top historical maritime artists in North America. His forte is richly detailed, realistic paintings of ships, seascapes and historical scenes. Works that are meticulously painted and researched.
The maritime museum recently purchased 19 of Miller’s works, which it plans to display in an exhibition. But in Vancouver, he’s largely under the radar — his last show at the Vancouver Maritime Museum was in 1996.
Miller has quite a history himself. Born in Winnipeg, he moved to Vancouver at age 18 and attended the Vancouver School of Art, when Jack Shadbolt, Orville Fisher and Gordon Smith were teaching there.
“I was going to be another Picasso when I went to art school,” he said. “Then you graduate and you realize you got to make a living. So I began my professional career in CBC Television. They had a graphic design studio and a set design studio, so I provided graphics.”
He left CBC for BCTV, then worked at the design firm Hopping, Kovach and Grinnell. In the mid-1960s and ’70s he became the chief designer at the Vancouver Museum and the Vancouver Maritime Museum.
He went freelance in the late ’70s, and did designs and illustrations for the Museum of Anthropology at the University of B.C., the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria, and the Museum of History in Ottawa. But he also designed houses — and he designed his studio himself.
“In order to not have to make a living off selling paintings, I did architectural design,” he said. “My friends wanted me to do their places, so I started renovating. The contractors wanted me to design houses, so I spent 40 years designing houses.”
He always had an interest in boats and maritime history, and has sailed extensively up the coast, including a five-month “shakedown cruise” to get to know a new sailboat he bought with his wife Dale.
He often painted geographic points he had seen first-hand. The catch was he often painted historical scenes that were too early to be photographed or painted. So he did a ton of research to get things right before setting his brush to canvas.
“It takes longer to research in most cases (than paint),” said Miller, who retired from sailing when he was age 88. “To get the ships, right, you’ve got to know what they look like. When no plans exist, and they don’t for most of the early stuff, I drew the plans.”
He also “realized that there was a big gap in maritime history illustration,” particularly West Coast maritime illustration. When he designed museum exhibits, “there were two or three paintings that kept being used over and over and over again.”
So he started doing historical paintings in the late ‘80s.
“I decided there’s a need, and it would be fun to try,” he said.
Hence you get a painting such as one that depicts First Nations people on the Quadra Island shoreline in 1792, spotting Capt. George Vancouver’s ship the Discovery.
“That’s Cape Mudge,” he explains. “There was a village on the bank, and those petroglyphs on the rocks are still there.”
“It took me from the late ‘80s until 2011 to get the first book together, because of house designs and other stuff,” he said.
But he’s got lots of other irons in the fire: he has a design for a new National Maritime Museum. He realizes it’ll probably never get built, but his passion for Canada’s maritime history is undiminished.
