Vu Nguyen /
Period 3 /
John Paul Miller was born on April 23, 1918 in Pennsylvania. He spent most of his childhood with his grandparents after his mother died at the age of two. His family bought a house in Shaker Heights and he went to Fernway elementary for the rest of his 6th grade year. He had an art teacher that ran all of the art departments. She decided to have everyone learn manuscript writing and it was a struggle for him to learn it.
At the age of five, he enrolled in some morning classes at the art museum. One of his classes usually had a story time and you would have to draw a picture during that story time. After spending years in that museum, him and his friends picked out some of their favorite objects and learned about them. Some of his favorites were the enameled boxes. They were French snuff boxes with gold or sometimes medallion with a face on it. His interest of arts grew after spending years learning in this art museum.
He then started his junior high or high school year at the Cleveland School of Art. He had a really brilliant teacher named Otto Ege. He taught John how to draw the person sitting next to him without having to look at your drawing. John was amazed because he didn’t think you could do something like that and that he had acquired a very special skill to him. John took another class with Kenneth F. Bates, it was a craft design class, and Kenny had John do two enamel trays and that was the first thing he knew anything about enamel. Then in high school, John did his firstoil paintings, some of them were lives with bottles and one with a portrait of his dog, he really enjoyed the class.
During high school John started working at Highbee’s and designed sets there. He didn’t know what he wanted to do after he graduate, he thought he wanted to be a set designer or a stage designer until he went to the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut to learn more about the course. The director of the school told him that he wouldn’t be able to make a living as a stage designer. His family didn’t have very much money so he decided to go to the Cleveland Institute of Art and get an art training there instead.
In his second year he took interior design with his friend Fred, he had taught John how to solder and saw. John and Fred worked on a card table together using an alcohol lamp and mouth blow torch in the living room. John started making silver rings in his basement in a little studio with a work bench, alcohol lamp, and mouth blow torch. He started working with wire silver then started working mainly with sheets afterwards.He was able to sell them to his step mother’s friends for about five or six dollars and made some good income out of it because his mother had some connections.His rings were different than other rings so he had a lot of orders for rings.
He bought himself a kiln and started working on ashtrays. Then his friend Kenny Baits figured a way to make a kiln, so he started making his own kiln. He loved painting and it was his passion but he wasn’t sure what to major in and he wasn’t into industrial design but he decided to major into Industrial design anyways and decided to minor in ceramics. He got to teach some half day classes on rendering techniques and research in nature when a professor left the course.
Then he went to the army after completing his B.F.A Degree in July 4, 1941. He brought a tool box to work on his jewelry. He made silver rings for the soldiers to give to their girlfriends. The Army had John paint them a Nativity scene for a church located on their base. He was assigned to paint 12 murals in the recreational hall. These murals were the sago of the armed forces, prehistoric warfare, and modern tanks.
After serving the Army he went back to the Cleveland School of Art. He was still living with his parents and started working on his jewelry and enameling in his studio again. People would ask him to something that was gold but he only liked working on silver because gold was too thin for him to work with. He ripped some pages out of a German magazine that he found with some illustrations of granulated jewelry that were elegant without any signs of soldering shown. He started doing research on granulating and asked many jewelers like Baron Erik Flemming about this technique.
With very little complex information, he began to master this technique through trial and error. He began working more comfortably with gold. John drafted out his granulation and put all the pieces together, he no longer needed soldering. He applied small creatures to his granulation, like crabs, spiders, beetles, and snails.He wastrying to get them sold so he could buy more gold to keep working on them. He got told buy a guy that he charged too little for his pieces, they were to double the amount of the price he was charging.
John and Fred worked together and redesigned their studio in a building. It was a good thing for him because he had someone else to give him more ideas made his career more fun. They both taught and then they would pick each other up and back to work on their designs. John and Fred gave up on painting and went exhibiting instead. They had a showcase and the museum purchased John’s two pieces of art work, a necklace and a bracelet.
John took his interest in his art career by evolving around a museum in Cleveland and by taking art classes throughout his whole life. He then started making his own silver rings and selling them to make extra profit. He one day found a German magazine and saw some granulating techniques that he wanted to learn. By achieving these techniques, he had to talk to many jewelers and artists in order to learn the secrets of it. After trial and error, he finally mastered it and had started working on gold to make a better commission out of it. He fused enameling to his little creatures to make them come alive and many were sold. John Paul Miller had earn his way to his achievement by exhibiting all his hard work at a museum.
Bibliography
. "Biography John Paul Miller."John Paul Miller. Temple University, 2010.Web. 16 Apr 2012. <