Biography

Reuben Aaron “R. A.” Miller (1912–2006) was a self-taught American artist and Baptist preacher from Gainesville, Georgia. After retiring from a career in cotton-mill work, Miller transformed his rural property into an environment filled with whirligigs, painted metal cutouts, handmade figures, and signs. Working primarily with discarded roofing tin, wood, house paint, crayon, and marker, he depicted angels, devils, animals, soldiers, dinosaurs, and figures from popular culture. His repeated inscriptions, particularly “Lord Love You” and “Blow Oskar,” became signatures of his deeply personal visual language. Miller emerged as an important figure in Southern self-taught art, and his work is held by institutions including Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. He died in 2006 at the age of ninety-three.