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Information:
"R.A. Miller's tiny chocolate brown house sits on a muddy hill overlooking Old Cornelia Highway in unincorporated Rabbittown, just outside of Gainesville. The building's inner skeleton slumps with age and the outer walls look puffy and waterlogged.
All around the structure the 81 year old folk artist has nailed his works, most of which are awkwardly proportioned cut-outs, tin-snipped from thin metal.
Depending on what the gallery scouts have left behind, pieces on display might include large, multicolored chickens, snakes, and sharks; red and black smirking devils; red, white and blue honest Abe caricatures; and other animal figures that look vaguely bovine or porcine. When a visitor finds something he wishes to purchase, Miller lifts a pair of pliers from his paint-smeared trousers and frees the work from the nail that holds it to his house.
A tall, solid, bespectacled man with an ever-packed lower lip full of "gentle mild" snuff, Miller then adds his signature in wavy cursive with a paint pen, sometimes also adding a mildly mischievous admonishment. "He's loose, ain't he," the artist might say, handing over a deep blue devil. "Raidin' the country, killin', lootin', doin' everything but the right thing... No don't let that thing get ya!"
From the look of the living quarters of artistically informed intowners and the walls of folksy galleries, R.A. Miller has recently begun to eclipse the Rev. Howard Finster as the decorative acoutrementeur of choice. Actor/director Tim Robbins was recently pictured in the New York Times with "Blow Oskar," Miller's whimsical tribute to his horn-honking cousin, prominently positioned in the background.
This shift in taste seems due to a few factors, including the proliferation of Finsteriana ("2631 works of art for God since lunchtime"), and the Rev.'s recent decline in detail work on his pieces. The major factor, though, seems to be economic. At Finster's Paradise Gardens studio, a tiny piece will run you $35 to $50, or twice to three times that much in town. At Miller's, you can get a 6 foot long multi-colored serpent painting with the words "Lord love you" scrawled across the top for $20, or a 3 foot devil for a ten spot. Intown prices for Miller's work vary widely, but most are still reasonable. However, a roll up to Rabbittown is certainly worth the savings.
R.A. Miller dropped out of school when he was 12 to go to work in a cotton mill. He retired about 15 years ago at 65 after his sight went bad due to glaucoma. To keep busy, he started making whirligigs, spinning wind toys he used to fashion as a boy. "I never did think nothin' about it [making art] when I could see," he explains in oh-so-folk-art logic. "I got to where I couldn't drive and couldn't go nowhere... I just got to doin' this to have something to do."
Renown soon came to Rabbittown via the Athens music express. In 1984 R.E.M. spliced images of Miller's whirligigs into their video for "Pretty Persuasion." Incidentally, that song was off the "Reckoning" album, whose cover art was a Stipe/Finster folksy collaboration. "R.E.M. bands from Athens was the first ones even to come," says Miller, who as a result of the exposure became known to many as The Whirligig Man. "They still come up here every once in awhile."
Miller's breezy pieces soon became a hip commodity as the Stipe-inspired folk art contagion infected Athens, first inside and then out. The artist still makes and sells his gigs - they sit on a hill behind his house and spin in the breeze of passing cars - but Miller's more popular works are his cut-outs and paintings."
Sadly, R. A. passed away on Tuesday, March 7, 2006 at the age of 93. He will be greatly missed.
Text is from Creative Loafing, Atlanta GA, May 1, 1993 and Images are courtesy of flyinhellhound
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