Interviews
Meet Gigi Mills
Born into a circus family and trained in performance, self taught artist Gigi Mills creates minimalist paintings full of feeling and depth. Find out more about her practice in our latest artist interview.
Erin Peacock
Saturday 11 March, 2023
Born into the well-known Mills Brothers Circus family, artist Gigi Mills was encouraged with her creative expression from a young age. Having trained in performance and choreography, she later became a full-time visual artist after teaching herself to paint.
Gigi’s paintings are minimalist, but full of feeling. When painting, she describes her desire to remove the details from life that obscure the real, essential experience. Her goal is to bear witness and to elevate the things “often considered unwanted or held in despair”. Accordingly, her paintings invoke a sense of quiet contemplation, of solitude and in-between, solitary moments.
Read on to hear more about the fantastic Gigi Mills…
Hi Gigi, thank you for taking the time to answer our questions today, we are so pleased to be speaking with you!
You have a fascinating background, having grown up in a well-known circus family and training in performance before moving into your visual arts practice. Could you tell us a bit about this transition between art forms, and some of the journey that led you to your work as a painter today?
Thank you for the opportunity to speak a bit about my work. Yes, I grew up in The Mills Brothers Circus, in a performing arts family where both the performing arts and plastic arts were revered. Dance and horse back riding lessons early on and my mother (who was Welsh) bought me oil paints and canvases at age 8.
However, my focus really was on theatre and dance until much later when I was caused to make an extreme change in my life I began teaching myself to paint. Museums and books were my teachers. Teaching myself technique. Just as in ballet we practice technique for years. But at some point you have to step out of the technique and begin to create. Now I keep telling myself there are no rules… I don’t know that there was ever a clear transition from moving my body through space in dance and theatre performance to painting, and now with the addition of sculpting in clay. Each is another natural extension of expression. I suppose though, I do prefer working alone in my studio. Perhaps that need for quiet and seclusion had played into it.
It seems you’ve always been compelled to make art, sketching and drawing whilst on the road as a child, but you are a self-taught painter. What would you say influences your paintings most – are there artists or environments that particularly inform your practice?
I believe it’s simply my own life that informs my work. Life is extremely rich for gathering experiences, people, and moments which all become grist for the mill. Nothing is off limits. I am determined – that’s not the right word – I’m driven to create beauty from pain.
We’ve read that your work comes from a need to reduce or simplify moments to their most essential details. Your paintings certainly have a beautiful minimalism to them, but they are never without a depth of feeling. Can you identify what it is that draws you to this reduction of things to their basic elements?
Of course, sometimes I simply come across beauty and it too is transformed. By reducing the moment or the object to its simplest form I’m trying to reveal the emotion I feel for it, or whatever emotion I feel exists within it. Often, my pieces start out very noisy and it seems to be through the act of removing the detritus that I then find the value and beauty and emotional content.
The beautiful, often subdued colours in your paintings contribute wonderfully to the overall effect of your works – and feel somewhat in contrast to the colourful maximalism of a circus! Could you speak to your relationship with colour, and your process of building colour into your paintings?
Color! Oh, sometimes it is the bane of my existence. I paint and paint – layers upon layers driving me crazy – until finally the melding of those colors becomes the image. It can’t be separated from the shape and here is the thing about oil paint: it reflects light, of course we all know this, but here is the other piece: even if you have orange ,for instance, in a layer very near the gesso the light will move through all of the layers hit the gesso and bounce back to your eye bringing with it every color that has been laid down layer under layer. You may not be consciously aware of the orange, or the plum or the pristine white, but your brain is! And with those unseen colors comes an emotion , a memory maybe… and you, as the viewer feel something. And then I am satisfied with my work.
Thank you to Gigi for sharing these wonderful insights! Gigi’s work will be presented at Affordable Art Fair NYC, where visitors will be able to discover an eclectic collection of her oil paintings. For more artist interviews, make sure to check out our Inspiration blog to be in-the-know.
Main image: Gigi Mills, ‘Calling the Hounds’, digital print, 69cm x 81cm, Emmanuelle G Gallery
