Five Minutes With Miles Hall

What can you tell us about your background in painting and art?

My father used to take me out landscape painting when I was a young boy and I remember falling in love with the way marks on a piece of paper created a sense of form in space. The first important drawing for me was on the ceiling of my parents’ Renault 12; I was about four and I took to covering the entire surface with pencil lines! Painting and drawing was always something I just did, I never really though about becoming an artist until much later on.

After leaving school I went to Queensland College of Art. Midway through the degree I left for Sydney to study at the Julian Ashton Art School. After finishing at art school in Australia I travelled and worked in the UK and Europe for two years – a kind of extended study tour of the Louvre, the MusОe d’Orsay, Centre Georges Pompidou and the National Gallery of London. I ended up spending close to four years in France and began showing my work with a fantastic dealer. It was in Montpellier where I also met my partner Virginie, the mother of my daughter Lila. We then returned to Australia where I took up a teaching position at Queensland College of Art and completed my doctorate. And seven years later we’re all back in Montpellier where I’m working and teaching at the art school.

Your Badger & Fox Gallery exhibition will be “a comprehensive collection of paintings”. How do you go about selecting works to comprehensively represent your art?

In fact I didn’t select them, the gallery did. Other people have a more objective viewpoint than I. I’m always interested in how my work is received and appreciated by others. Saying this, I think the show covers a large range of work over the last five or so years; it would give anyone unfamiliar with my practice a decent overview of what I’ve been doing.

Your painting style is minimalist yet colourful. How expressive can colours be in their own right?

Colour by itself is meaningless. It’s the way one colour responds with another colour, or the manner in which a colour relates to the space around it, that creates significance. As an artist, I’m interested in how our experience of colour can be intensified through exploring substance, surface and scale. Painting is a privileged site of investigation where colour operates as a material, physical phenomenon. For me, I try to evoke both a visual and haptic response from the viewer. My paintings are not images, they are things.

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