They are united
in love for each other and love for art. Kevin Miller and Robert Allen live in
the midst of nature in Brogue, Pennsylvania, building, painting, designing,
working on sculptures, listening to the songs of birds and the calls of animals
at night from the home they are designing with creativity and without pre-established
notions concerning space, form or materials. Jaquematepress visited them
recently at their Sawmill Barn Art Gallery and Studio.
--Would you like to chat a bit about your marriage and creative
activity?
--Sure!
--When were you married?
--Kevin: Last June 14 we
were married legally. If you had ever
told us a couple of years ago that we could go to the courthouse here in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and get a marriage license and be married legally by
an ordained minister of the Church of the Brethren, I would have told you that
you were completely out of your mind. I thought that Pennsylvania would be the
last state in the country to legalize same sex marriage. I just never expected
this development in my life. So this has been an enormously optimistic step. It
also gives me a great deal of hope for the work I do for climate change.
Sometimes we are tempted to think that there is no hope and that we are all
headed for mass extinction. And then
suddenly mass consciousness appears around the subject of marital equality. Now
looking at the movement for climate change I have this strong feeling in my
bones that something important is about to happen, that we are approaching a
radical, sudden, catalytic change. Today (June 18th) Pope Francis
issued an encyclical on climate change and world poverty and I could not get
through more than a few sentences without weeping. It is absolutely brilliant!
--How did the two of you meet?
Robert: I used to go to country-western dances. But the place
didn’t open until eight O’clock so I went to “The Raven,” a gay resort, to wait for the dance to begin and it
was there that I met Keven. That was in New Hope, near the river between
Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
--Kevin: I had been in a very bad relationship and had packed all
my bags to stay on the road for a month at a time. But there I was at “The Raven” and I saw Robert walking on
the veranda and was immediately smitten. I liked the way he looked in his tight
jeans and cowboy boots and so that was the beginning. That was 20 years ago. We
have lived together for 18 and a half years.
--So what’s the chemistry that keeps you together?
--Kevin: We have a lot of the same interests. I think that has a
lot to do with it.
--Robert: We have a combination that would scare 90% of the gay
people in the world. We aren’t clean fanatics. I don’t go around the house and
pick up everything so that all is spot free. We tend to live in disarray and in
projects. I could take a room apart and reconstruct it while we are living in it.
We both see things the same way. We see
what the potential is, not what it originally is.
--Kevin: I agree with Robert. I think one of the driving engines of
our relationship is that we are both creative project people. We love to make
things. Whether it is art, a house or a garden or bringing people to these
woods to see our work. I don’t think we are ever happier than when we are
building. We have overlapping but not competing interests. I like to design, to
design the building, let’s say. Robert’s area of expertise is to actually
construct the building, or whatever the project it is. We talk about it in
advance and tend to have the same vision of it. The other day we were talking
about this sculpture and out of the blue we both told each other that we had
had the same dream a few nights earlier about a stained glass chapel, although
we didn’t tell it to each other until a few days later. Robert is the
construction part. I admire him for that. I do the design but we both listen
and pay attention to what the other thinks. We appear to be arguing all the
time but what we really are doing is not arguing but engaging in creative
conversation about how to solve problems.
--Robert: I can see a project from beginning to end. Kevin sees the
final product. I know how to get there.
–Kevin: The fact is that this man has a pure heart. I value that pure
as fresh snow heart more than anything else in the world. When I met him I had
given up on ever finding anyone who could offer true love. I had come to think that
that it wasn’t possible. That’s why we had a year and a half courtship. But one
day he called me. I was on the west coast and he was on the east coast. He told
me his mother was dying.
--Robert: She had gone into
a coma. I had just come back from New York and Kevin called and all he said was
to ask what the closest airport was. I told him it was Syracuse airport and he
packed up and flew all the way from California to my Mom’s funeral.
--Do both of your feel that there is a continuity between your love
relationship and your creative activity?
--Robert: We both continually evolve but we are doing different
things. We are growing but in the same direction. I went from woodwork to
painting and now I’m switching from painting to sculpture. Kevin started with
painting, then evolved to sculpture. Our work continues to inspire each other. We
have always had a connection between the two of us.
--Kevin: I was listening to a spiritual teacher on the internet the
other day and he said something which really struck me, he said: “look at your
partner every day, every hour and ask yourself who are you now, who are you
now.” As Robert says, we are all evolving constantly. One of the things that
makes life with this man so exciting is that he never fails to surprise me. He
said he would never paint no matter what but seven years ago I was painting
something for someone and I had a bunch of canvases and brushes lying around
and he was bored and picked up a canvass and a brush and said: “How do you do
this?” I said: “You just put some paint on the brush and wipe it on the
canvass.” And now look at the work he has done over the past seven years! He
has just blown my mind with his body of work. He has far succeeded my success. I’ve
never had an exposition but he has had an exposition at the Westmoreland museum
of American art.
--What inspires you in your work with art?
--Kevin: I see art in everything, people, places, animals, design,
function, I see beauty. A number of years ago we went to Paris with some
friends and we spent a day at the Versailles museum. I could see that Robert’s
eyes were getting bigger and bigger. We’d been there for most of the day
looking at all the works of art and at one point Robert just wheeled around and
said: “I’m an artist!” Most people see the world as it is. We don’t. We see the
world’s potential.
--Do you feel rejected by society?
--Kevin: I don’t really care. There are people out there who are
waiting to see a spark of creativity, another way of doing things.
“Me parece una película
muy lenta,” reclamó furioso un hombre que se identificó como “anarquista” en su
juventud y entró en una fuerte discusión con Jorge Altamira del Partido Obrero
luego de la exhibición ayer en el Centro Cultural San Martín de “Méimon,” un
film-ensayo de Rodrigo Moreno sobre la vida de una mujer doméstica. Para otro
espectador “es una película poética extraordinaria que además logra gran
profundidad.” En realidad la “lentitud” de la película tiene que ver con la
estética del director y su manera de comunicar con el espectador.
