"WE ARE enveloped and drenched in the marvelous, but we do not see," Baudelaire has said. The artist Terry Miura sees, and he achieves one of the prime functions of the artist by enabling us to see the familiar in a new light.
Miura endows arches, pediments, columns and doorways with a kind of timeless poetic nostalgia and uses their abstract potential to achieve compositions that compel our attention. The nostalgic mood is heightened by understated muted color and by the lone passerby, alienated and oblivious of the scene and unaware that he is being observed — another who does not see.
Miura's original vision is enhanced by a thorough mastery of his craft. These paintings live in the viewer's mind — a quality not often found in the frenetic world of contemporary art.
