Ruth Miller is a poet in paint, and a passionate artist with a gentle spirit. Her current exhibition at the NY Studio School, up through October 22, is a must-see exhibition. With paintings from the 1960s through the present, it functions as a brief survey of her artistic journey, from the bravura of vigorous landscapes to the quiet of still lifes. The earliest paintings, large semi-abstractions, make nods to the ubiquity of Abstract Expressionism in their broad brushstrokes and brave gestures, although Ruth always retained her personal response to color, light and place – generally her backyard. Through the decades the paintings shrink in size, and the color becomes the magic of light, and the expression of emotional presence. But it is when she embarks on the still life, apparently around 2000, that her intimate poetry fully emerges. Her color no longer is simply of place, but of empathetic transcendence, where subtle grays and quiet chromas bring us into her world of meditative connection, of her warmth and belief and love, where the paintings have no beginning or end, but just are, as if they and their objects existed through all time. In some ways, Miller is not a still life painter at all. She is a painter of the elusive air that gives breath to existence, to the generosity of the human spirit, and to the compassion that is Ruth Miller. Photos are posted in approximate reverse chronological order.