Peter Miller Photography at the Squashed Gallery
Evan’s shift from environmental consulting to professional artist has been gradual. He began by showing his work to a few unbiased people around town. Then he approached the folks at Helen Day Art Center in Stowe. “They gave me a lot of support,” he says. That meeting led to a stint teaching Intro to Drawing and multi-media classes at Helen Day. In 2014 Evan spent a month at Rhode Island School of Design, learning the ins and outs of Adobe Illustrator. “The digital work is reductionist—you say so much with so little. The analog work is exactly the opposite. I love that dichotomy.” Evan’s strength is illustration and its elements that carry over to graphic design. He is not a trained graphic designer, but his illustration style and business connections are leaning in that direction and he’s getting work that calls on his design skills. A creation for Doc Ponds, a restaurant in Stowe, is a good example. “Lance Violette of The Violette Studio contacted a few artists in the area to design the graphics on snowboards that were going to be hung on the wall as part of the restaurant’s decor. The canvas—a snowboard—was the same shape and size for everyone. It was fun to see how different artists approached the project and what they did.” Meeting Lance Violette was a pivotal moment in Evan’s career. “We met and we clicked over old-school snowboarding,” Evan explains. Their meeting opened several doors in the snowboarding industry. In August Evan produced a solo show called “Lake Life: A Creative Exploration Through Illustration and Design” at the Gallery at Hague Creek in Lake George. The gallery supports up-and-coming artists, as well as successful artists, by introducing a different artist and show every week. When he’s not snowboarding, mountain biking, or hiking with his dogs, Evan hunkers down to work in his upstairs guest-bedroom studio. The room is small, clean, and tidy. There are two workstations: an analog desk with paper, pens, and pencils for drawings by hand, and a digital desk with a computer for digital designs. Shelves with finished work and works in progress line one wall. Another wall is covered with framed drawings. A dry-erase board itemizes his workload. The room is meticulously organized, a phenomenon Evan attributes to his wife Katie. “She has an amazing ability to keep me organized,” he says. “Any success that I can lay claim to is a direct result of relationships with people in town,” he says. “Like-minded people in Stowe have been so helpful. So much has stemmed from really good people here and I am very thankful for that.” n
CHISMARK
Peter Miller Is The Distinguished Photographer and Author of Vermont Farm Women and A Lifetime of Vermont PeopleBest Non-Fiction Book from the Northeast by Independent Book Publishers. The author will autograph his coffee table books & offers limited edition large size prints in black & white & color.
20 Crossroad, Waterbury, VT | two houses south of Ben & Jerry’s on route 100 peter@petermillerphotography.com | 802.272.8851 Call for an appointment
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