In a large, open room in the basement of Bellingham’s old city hall, small cabinets line the walls storing spray paint, various types of tape, cans of WD-40, and at least four different hand drills.
Wearing round glasses and a research hat, museum taxidermist David Miller stands untidily at his work table. He is shaping fake dinosaur bones. They are hidden in a box and covered with sand so that children can take on the role of paleontologists and discover the creatures of the prehistoric past.
The interactive sculpture will be part of an exhibition, the museum’s latest, showcasing the work of an experienced and widely published scientific illustrator – Miller himself.
Miller is working on a sculpture made of dinosaur bones that will be hidden under sand and can be uncovered by museum visitors. (Photo credit: Lauren Gallup / NWPB)
“Typically, David’s work is commissioned by scientists or paleontologists and museums to serve as illustrations for the fossils,” said Amy Chaloupka, the curator who came up with the idea for the exhibit along with Miller and the museum’s executive director. “This exhibit is really flipped in that respect, we’re really highlighting David’s work and the fossils serve to illustrate his paintings.”
Chaloupka, like many others around him, genuinely appreciates Miller’s work.
But without Miller’s careful planning and his dream of having his own exhibition, the exhibition would never have come to fruition.
For years, Miller painted and drew large originals for commissions. He scanned the originals to reprint and reproduce them. The images are used in textbooks or displayed alongside fossils in museums. He always kept the originals, sometimes adding more later and storing them in a closet at home.
“I said, ‘One day I’m going to have a show.’ That was 1996,” Miller said. “‘One day I’m going to have a show!'” After a pause, Miller said, “Well, this is a long-term game.”
The long-term game, indeed. The exhibition, UNEARTHED Art and science examine the fossil recordis filled with more than 60 of Miller’s rich, lifelike paintings. They are paired with fossils found by Burke Museum and the Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals as well as some from Miller’s private collection.
The new exhibition begins with one of Miller’s most recent works, a painting of woolly mammoths that was commissioned after the Whatcom Museum received a molar from a woolly mammoth. The exhibition marks the first time the molar has been shown to the public.
As he often does with commissioned works, Miller worked with a scientist to make the painting as faithful to the original as possible.
Camilo Ponton is an assistant professor of geology at Western Washington University. Ponton and Miller worked together to unearth information about woolly mammoth behavior patterns.
“The challenge with fossils is that you only have remains of hard body parts,” Ponton said. “You don’t know what color their fur or coat is… Artistic representation of extinct creatures is very challenging because of the lack of information, especially about colors and some things that are very visual to us.”
Ponton worked with Miller to study the animal’s anatomy, preserved fur, and tooth enamel to show where these animals might have roamed. These puzzle pieces helped Miller create a realistic painting of a herd of mammoths marching through the grass at sunset in what we now call Alaska.
“It’s a challenge because you don’t want to limit artistic creativity,” Ponton said. “We’re very visual creatures and that’s what we do: we produce a visual representation and then we have to try to double-check facts or what we know and what we don’t know. And in areas where we don’t really know, I think the artists have the upper hand and can decide whether they want to represent the creature this way or that way.”
As Miller demonstrated the process, he explained that imagination is a part of scientific illustration. Sometimes visual details, such as colors or the proportions of an animal, have to be invented. However, this invention is based on facts. Ponton said Miller does incredibly thorough research.
“David has a deep knowledge of many areas of this science, just from that perspective, because of the processes he has gone through,” Chaloupka said.
Miller, ever modest, quickly adds: “It’s a kind of osmosis. I’m not a scientist. They send me all these manuscripts, I have to read them. It’s like I’m learning something despite everything.”
Miller at the door to his workshop, which he shares with other museum staff. (Photo credit: Lauren Gallup / NWPB)
He manages to transform science into something plausible and beautiful.
“I used to draw human figures a lot and got to the point where I could create a plausible human figure from my imagination,” Miller said. “So this was kind of a learning tool.”
He said he aids his creative process by using physical things he can find, such as a sliced chicken leg from the supermarket to imagine lifelike bones and veins.
Miller’s long and successful career has seen his work exhibited at the Smithsonian and Yale. He said it started with a childhood fascination with dinosaurs. He said he once drew a series of prehistoric creatures to decorate the walls of the elementary school library where his mother worked.
At the end of the interview, Miller returns his focus to completing the dinosaur sculpture, a potential spark of inspiration for the next generation of scientists, paleontologists and artists.
