By Lindsey Baxter | [email protected]

Patty Miller grew up in Salt Lake in a very artistic family and is proud to be a Utah girl. Miller’s family owned a restaurant in Holladay called the Town and Country Inn, which is now called Café Madrid. Miller grew up with horses and rode professionally. Before she went to college, she started to paint in pastels just a little. She went to the University of Utah and left to start her career in interior design with commercial and residential interiors. She traveled with this job extensively and didn’t do anything with art as she was so busy with her career. 

After she retired after 30 years of interior design, she decided to pick art back up. She went to artist and teacher Suzy Jarvis and received help with oil paintings. Jarvis taught her the fundamentals of oil paintings. After that, a group of women formed a little art colony and hired a teacher and artist, Brendan Clary, who helps them with colors and is a good teacher in helping with their different experiences in art. Miller has been doing this for about eight years now.

The Holladay Arts Council recently named Miller its Artist of the Month. 

“I love color and flowers and just the creative part of it for me is a wonderful escape from whatever I am doing,” Miller says. Miller works with oil paintings and will take requests from others to create pieces for them. She has sold quite a few of her pieces to different people. She painted a very large apple once that a man bought to put in his office in New York. Miller has had her pieces hung in Café Niche and done shows in the Cottonwood Country Club. 

Miller finished a piece recently that she is putting in the Holladay Art Show called “Morning Mist,” which is a tugboat on the water. It was a challenge but something she loved very much. She loves her pieces and finds pride in the finished product.

Miller’s focus the last year has been painting. It is her true hobby and she loves the outcome of the finished product. “I just finally decided I didn’t want to do interior design anymore with the tremendous amount of work and I wanted to play more tennis and golf. I thought it was time to retire but I need to keep busy so I thought it was time to go back and take up my art,” Miller says.

Miller likes to deal in larger paintings and take up to a week to finish. “You look at your paintings and you think you’re done and you look at them again and you think I should’ve done this a little more. I don’t know if the painting is ever really finished — you can keep poking at it but that sometimes can overdo the piece,” Miller says.

Miller is a happy woman with a true desire to create art that brings joy to others. She loves spending time outside golfing, playing tennis and riding horses. Miller loves to spend time with her grandchildren. She is extremely humbled to have earned Holladay’s Artist of the Month. Although Miller doesn’t have a website, she is available through email at [email protected].

To nominate an Artist of the Month, email [email protected].