Oranggena

Hemlock and acrylic

10 inches wide

from R. Kipp Miller's "Slices of Life" series

Forest floors, ocean shores, abandoned factories, railbeds, roadside ditches, a village dump—these are the places that provide the wood, glass, stone, iron and bone that comprise Kipp Miller’s creations.

Ah, these melon slices.

For foresters, properly felling a tree first requires the making of a well-placed, wedge-shaped “first cut” to help determine the precise direction in which the tree will fall. These first cuts are the wood fragments Miller “gives new life to,” so to speak. A new life to those sole remnants of trees that once towered over us all. Maple, oak, beech, birch, cherry, ash, hemlock or white pine—each slice of wood was found by the artist on a rural New Hampshire roadside and
then hand sanded, painted and polished, with no two sides alike.