USD grad brings winged creatures to life with paintings

There is a small room tucked away in the Warren M. Lee Center for Fine Arts that very few non-art students know about.

Gallery 110 is a sparse room, with only a long office table in the center, surrounded by chairs. Students go there to study and admire the art hanging on the walls all around its length. Currently, the walls are filled with paintings of birds.

House Wrens, Robins, Cardinals and Woodpeckers are all perched quietly in the low light. They are very small, light paintings, only a fraction of the size of the frames that house them. Despite their size, they have certain uniqueness. University of South Dakota alumnus Darcy Millette’s paintings let the personalities of the birds shine forth through the canvas, acrylic and the watercolor paints.

Millette graduated from USD in 2007, with a bachelor’s degree of fine arts with an emphasis in painting. Millette said she had fun attending USD by going to all of her classes and being generally a good student. During her time as an art student, she focused her attention on painting portraits. After Millette graduated, she stayed in Vermillion for a year helping ceramics professor Mike Hill.
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In return, he let her use his studio to paint.

It was after leaving USD that she began to focus on painting different subjects.

“After I graduated, I was doing portraits in a limited studio space,” Millette said. “So, I switched to bird portraits.”

The person responsible for bringing Millette’s art back to USD is one of the Fine Arts Center’s curators, Amy Fill.

“She’s been a friend for years now,” Fill said. “Being in a small state, our art community stays close together. We try to stay in contact, support each other.”

Alison Erazmus, the Director of the University’s Art Galleries, also had a role in bringing the exhibit to Vermillion.

The birds seem almost conversational; it is no coincidence that on the back of Millette’s business card there is a bird with empty thought bubbles over its head.

The portraits and even the brush strokes themselves, invite the viewer to converse with the birds, to ponder what they would say.

Millette describes her portraits as gestural, not abstract, realistic, but not photorealistic. She starts the process of making a painting by first choosing a photograph of a local bird species. Millette only works on a painting for an hour or so before she either finishes the painting, or if she believes it is unsuccessful, moves on to the next subject.

“I feel that in working this way, I can keep the brush strokes loose and expressive,” she said.

Each painting is unique because all of the birds have their own personalities.

“What I like about these paintings is that they’re really quick, loose and expressive,” Fill said. “What she’s beginning to do is to play with the personalities we give to animals.”

In a painting titled “Northern Cardinal” the eponymous red bird sits perched upon a branch with its head slightly cocked to the side—as if it is curious as to why someone is watching it. In another painting titled “Ring-necked Pheasant” the gamebird is viewed up-close; its eye open wide and round, as if it is startled to see someone looking back at it.

Junior Paige Seim stopped to look at the exhibit on the way home from class.

“The paintings were very simple, but very beautiful,” she said.

Millette’s life has become much busier since she graduated college, but she still loves to work and paint. She’s married to Anthony Millette, who is a potter and fellow USD alumnus. They have two young children; a 4-year-old son named Isaac, and a 1-year-old daughter named Adele.

“I have a show coming up in November and December at the Museum of Visual Materials in Sioux Falls,” Millette said, addressing her future.

Several of her bird portraits featured in Gallery 110 will also be there. One of her bird pieces is featured as a part of the 5th Annual Governors Exhibit; it will travel from Rapid City to Sioux Falls over the course of the year.