John Paul Miller

Vu Nguyen

Period 3

John Paul Miller was born on April 23, 1918 in Pennsylvania. He spent most of his childhood

with his grandparents after his mother died at the age of two. His family bought a house in

Shaker Heights and he went to Fernway elementary for the rest of his 6th grade year. He had an

art teacher that ran all of the art departments. She decided to have everyone learn manuscript

writing and it was a struggle for him to learn it.

At the age of five, he enrolled in some morning classes at the art museum. One of his classes

usually had a story time and you would have to draw a picture during that story time. After

spending years in that museum, him and his friends picked out some of their favorite objects

and learned about them. Some of his favorites were the enameled boxes. They were French

snuff boxes with gold or sometimes medallion with a face on it. His interest of arts grew after

spending years learning in this art museum.

He then started his junior high or high school year at the Cleveland School of Art. He had a

really brilliant teacher named Otto Ege. He taught John how to draw the person sitting next to

him without having to look at your drawing. John was amazed because he didn’t think you

could do something like that and that he had acquired a very special skill to him. John took

another class with Kenneth F. Bates, it was a craft design class, and Kenny had John do two

enamel trays and that was the first thing he knew anything about enamel. Then in high school,

John did his first oil paintings, some of them were lives with bottles and one with a portrait of

his dog, he really enjoyed the class.

During high school John started working at Highbee’s and designed sets there. He didn’t know

what he wanted to do after he graduate, he thought he wanted to be a set designer or a stage

designer until he went to the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut to learn more

about the course. The director of the school told him that he wouldn’t be able to make a living

as a stage designer. His family didn’t have very much money so he decided to go to the

Cleveland Institute of Art and get an art training there instead.

In his second year he took interior design with his friend Fred, he had taught John how to solder

and saw. John and Fred worked on a card table together using an alcohol lamp and mouth blow

torch in the living room. John started making silver rings in his basement in a little studio with a

work bench, alcohol lamp, and mouth blow torch. He started working with wire silver then

started working mainly with sheets afterwards. He was able to sell them to his step mother’s

friends for about five or six dollars and made some good income out of it because his mother

had some connections. His rings were different than other rings so he had a lot of orders for

rings.

He bought himself a kiln and started working on ashtrays. Then his friend Kenny Baits figured a

way to make a kiln, so he started making his own kiln. He loved painting and it was his passion

but he wasn’t sure what to major in and he wasn’t into industrial design but he decided to

major into Industrial design anyways and decided to minor in ceramics. He got to teach some

half day classes on rendering techniques and research in nature when a professor left the

course.

Then he went to the army after completing his B.F.A Degree in July 4, 1941. He brought a tool

box to work on his jewelry. He made silver rings for the soldiers to give to their girlfriends. The

Army had John paint them a Nativity scene for a church located on their base. He was assigned

to paint 12 murals in the recreational hall. These murals were the sago of the armed forces,

prehistoric warfare, and modern tanks.

After serving the Army he went back to the Cleveland School of Art. He was still living with his

parents and started working on his jewelry and enameling in his studio again. People would ask

him to something that was gold but he only liked working on silver because gold was too thin

for him to work with. He ripped some pages out of a German magazine that he found with

some illustrations of granulated jewelry that were elegant without any signs of soldering

shown. He started doing research on granulating and asked many jewelers like Baron Erik

Flemming about this technique.

With very little complex information, he began to master this technique through trial and error.

He began working more comfortably with gold. John drafted out his granulation and put all the

pieces together, he no longer needed soldering. He applied small creatures to his granulation,

like crabs, spiders, beetles, and snails. He was trying to get them sold so he could buy more gold

to keep working on them. He got told buy a guy that he charged too little for his pieces, they

were to double the amount of the price he was charging.

John and Fred worked together and redesigned their studio in a building. It was a good thing for

him because he had someone else to give him more ideas made his career more fun. They both

taught and then they would pick each other up and back to work on their designs. John and

Fred gave up on painting and went exhibiting instead. They had a showcase and the museum

purchased John’s two pieces of art work, a necklace and a bracelet.

John took his interest in his art career by evolving around a museum in Cleveland and by taking

art classes throughout his whole life. He then started making his own silver rings and selling

them to make extra profit. He one day found a German magazine and saw some granulating

techniques that he wanted to learn. By achieving these techniques, he had to talk to many

jewelers and artists in order to learn the secrets of it. After trial and error, he finally mastered it

and had started working on gold to make a better commission out of it. He fused enameling to

his little creatures to make them come alive and many were sold. John Paul Miller had earn his

way to his achievement by exhibiting all his hard work at a museum.

Bibliography

. "Biography John Paul Miller." John Paul Miller. Temple University, 2010. Web. 16 Apr 2012.

<http://www.temple.edu/crafts/public_html/mjcc/local/history/biographies/b124.html>.

http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-john-paul-miller-12877

http://collections.madmuseum.org/code/emuseum.asp?

emu_action=searchrequest&moduleid=2&profile=people&currentrecord=1&searchdesc=John%20Paul

%20Miller&style=single&rawsearch=constituentid/,/is/,/898/,/false/,/true