About

Born 2001 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Rachel Miller is a surrealist artist now based in Boulder, Colorado. Paint is her main medium, however she has an art nouveau mentality; utilizing every medium possible to create a world made of art, dabbling in wood carving, mosaics, sewing, and about any medium she can get her hands on. 

Her work is centered around dreams, mythology, and concepts of beauty and womanhood. She has studied art history, analytical psychology, ancient mythology, tarot symbolism, and much more. These studies inform her work, especially when analyzing and painting dreams, then further comparing these symbols to myths and fairytales. She considers her art more of a scientific process, a way of directly documenting and mapping images of the unconscious, both personal and collective. 

To achieve her surrealistic images she strictly paints from life, which forces her to get creative with overlaying different objects as references when not directly in front of the landscape. She uses fabric and lace to mimic water, or small trinkets and objects she finds to create an enchanted world in paint. Between sifting through dream symbols and outer objects, her process becomes a surrealist scavenger hunt, where trolls, fairies, and strange little creatures lead her on the journey. 

Her favorite and most painted symbol is the butterfly, the most profound symbol of death and rebirth, that she most relates to the life of an artist. To be an artist one must continuously go through a process of death, spiritually and emotionally, and rebirth, emerging with a completely new set of images and a new discovery of self. The butterfly symbols come to Rachel in an automatic way, that can be compared to the alchemical process. Through the years she painted versions of herself as the silver butterfly, the golden butterfly, the rainbow butterfly, the stone, moss, and water butterfly, the shadow butterfly, the tiger butterfly, the zebra butterfly, and the lace butterfly. It is a somewhat tragic symbol to her, representing the fleeting moments of intense artistic inspiration, followed by a re-entry into the cocoon. 

Her main goal as an artist is to infuse beauty and depth into every aspect of her own life which hopefully overflows to the rest of the world.