How Does Harland Miller Live A Life In Balance?

The Yorkshire-born contemporary artist and novelist is best known for his large-scale paintings that play on classic book covers, including his acclaimed Penguin series, which launched in 1992 with I’m So Fucking Hard Ernest Hemingway. At the start of 2026 he had an exhibition at The Design Museum in London, and his show at Nevill Holt in Leicestershire opens on 29 May.

From cold sea swims to sticking to his guns, he tells Lucinda Baring how he lives a life in balance.

First thing in the morning I… go for a swim in the sea. I live on the coast in Norfolk and there’s one tiny cafe on the beach called Frenchie’s. When they see me arrive, they put my breakfast on. I grew up in Whitby and swam every day when I was a kid too. Even when I lived in Manhattan, I had to find somewhere on Long Island to get into the ocean. I have had some terrible swims but I always feel good afterwards.

I feel unhinged when… I haven’t had any caffeine. I’m reading Playback by Raymond Chandler and when Marlowe answers the phone, he says ‘I’m old, tired and full of no coffee’. I can relate.

I feel grounded when… my feet hit the ground and I’m walking back through the surf after a swim.

I treat myself by… having tea and cake around 3pm with my studio manager. It’s become ritualistic.

I let my hair down by… having a gin and tonic. That’s the start of the letting my hair down process. My wife makes gin and Hogarth’s Gin Lane and all those poor women come to mind but gin is transformative. My hair’s down a lot.

I escape by… leaning into my Piscean nature. I know a lot of Pisceans, so celebrating our birthdays would take the whole month; instead we get together and have a Pisces night. We have a lot of positive traits but the negative ones are we are prone to drug addiction and escapism. I’m not a drug addict but I am an escape artist.

My greatest vice is… staying up all night. It’s easiest to get fully immersed in work once everyone else has gone home and stopped calling, aside from the fuckers in LA. There’s an intoxicating, never-ending quality to the night, the way it stretches out ahead of you. Days just seem to fastly disappear all the time.

My greatest virtue is… I was re-reading The Great Gatsby and Nick Carraway says everyone suspects themselves of possessing at least one virtue. His was being a good listener. I think mine is too.

My relationship with my phone is… great. I got my first phone when my wife Jane was pregnant 27 yrs ago and I never looked back. When I first moved to London, I had a girlfriend in Leeds and I used to take columns of 10ps down to the local phone box. Now I associate the smell of piss with being in love.

I am grateful for… so many things. Channelling the way Native Americans used to name their children – by looking out the window, and the child would be called Passing Cloud – today I’m grateful for my herd of seven Alpacas. One, Jilly Johnson, has just had a baby. I am also grateful for love, in a universal way.

I really can’t stand… the passage of time. The way the day ends. As a kid I loved Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. I want to go and live in that surreal landscape where time has stopped. I was disappointed when I saw the painting in the flesh – it’s tiny, the Athena poster I had as a kid was bigger – and the illusion of escaping into that vast theatrical landscape was shattered.

I wish I could… slow down time.

My greatest luxury is… lazing on a sunny Sunday afternoon with my seven cats, blinking occasionally. And vintage diver’s watches – I have a Seiko one I bought in Berlin. The date is stuck on Tuesday, Dienstag in German, abbreviated to ‘Die’. So when I look at the watch it says ‘Die’. I quite like the fact I’m still alive.

I had an ah-ha moment when… I discovered a box of old Penguin books when I was living in Paris in 1991. I was looking for English books to read and there was a bunch in a box outside a bookshop in Notre Dame. I emptied them out onto the studio floor and the typographic covers of those old Penguins jumped out at me. I stayed up all night and made my first Penguin painting. I went home and when I returned the next day, and I had forgotten that my art dealer was meeting me and by the time I got there, he had sold that first painting. The rest is history. That was the start of the Penguin series, and I have just made my very last Penguin prints, called The Final Five.

A wise person once told me… to stick to my guns. As an artist in the late 90s, painting had been guillotined on the stroke of the new decade. During the new conceptual era, a lot of painters changed what they were doing. I held firm and consequently didn’t sell any work. I started writing novels, and sold one for a big advance and there was a bidding war for the movie rights. That never would have happened if I’d been a successful artist. I carried on painting in the background and when I was struggling to write a second novel, painting took off again.

Harland Miller has an exhibition at Nevill Holt Festival (29 May to 21 June) and is in conversation at Nevill Holt about his life and work on 12 June, book here.