About the Book
Art, friendship, innovative thinking, creativity, words, and laughter. This was what was important! Art changed drastically in the early 1900's. Many young women were part of this, but few were remembered. Ideas, the spirits found in nature and physics and pueblos, and the influence of international friends came together to make the individual Peter Miller! Who is this? Full of Creative Spirit and a "Magical Realist," Henrietta Myers, from the small town of Hanover, PA, with famous racehorse farms, changed her name, ran off to the high desert, and married C.Earle Miller. They both studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art and with Arthur Carles, in the day of great artistic change - the 1930's, then traveled in France and Spain. She became part of a circle of great innovators - the Surrealists, and yet found her own quietly adventurous style. Her work was shown at galleries and museums in NYC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and Philadelphia. She was from Hanover, PA, but not "of" Hanover. She found herself in Nature, in the mountains of New Mexico, and in the studio on her farm, in Chester County, PA. She knew many big names in the art world - Matisses, Ernst, Calder, and Wyeths, Julien Levy and museum directors, writers, critics, artists and thinkers. Her encouragement and joie de vivre affected many. Her friends of all walks in life shared in the fun. Her spirituality was strong, of ancient dreams and constant questing. Her determined self-actualization was a role-model, a legacy far beyond immediate family. Peter never had children, but many "godchildren" were part of her life, as she was to a special wise-woman in the desert, Edith Warner. Poets and physicists and Pueblo life were part of the story as well, and her gun-toting palomino-riding husband who sculpted and drew matadors, bulls, horses, and always, dancers. This book is about her life and those she loved, influenced, and shared with. It is about what is really important and authentic. Her story is a complex one, hidden for many years, and guarded by her wishes for privacy and her own "mythomania" that precludes detailed research. The book is merely a collage, a beginning attempt to explain Peter Miller, to put her work into a context.. Yet, her art is outstanding, unique, and very symbolic of her times, and evocative of times past. She embodied many ideals that artists strive for, and had no need or wish to play games with fame or fortune. She needed neither, yet she wished for recognition. The author hopes that this book gives her that satisfaction. It's time to notice her independent American style, and enjoy the stories and words she left us, and to perhaps begin our own adventures.
About the Author: Andrea Miller Theisson grew up an artist, in the same town of Hanover, PA as her subject, but Peter Miller is related only in spirit, through friendships and godchildren. A professional artist, magna-cum laude graduate of Philadelphia's Tyler School of Art, tapestry weaver and painter, the author lives now in a farmhouse near Gettysburg, PA after exploring both the East Coast and the West, especially the Santa Cruz Mountains in California and northern New Mexico. Her soul-places are similar to Peter Miller's and a fascination with words and history brought this story full-circle to the inevitable connections of many different worlds. More about the author's visual arts, events and philosophy can be found at her website: http: //www.paintweaver.com/
