These dashing portraits of New York critics David Cohen and Joseph Wolin (both friends of mine) are part of a 40-day, 40-portrait campaign waged by Irish painter Nick Miller, when he was in residence this fall in a Brooklyn studio. Miller isn’t a painter so much by profession, as by ontology. His practice is all about facing up to what being a painter could mean, at this late date, and to what is involved in using paint to encounter the world. The result, often, seems to be a kind of “painting degree zero” – just making representation happen, without thinking too much about style or manner. It’s as if Samuel Beckett had written, “I can’t paint, I will paint.”

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