AustLit

''Portraiture is the art of misrepresentation. It's the art of unlikeness. That's why it's so difficult,' the narrator of The Sitters explains early in his fraught and deeply individual account of painting from life (and death). As the work of painting proceeds, he takes the reader into some of the concerns that have come to characterise Miller's fiction: the dense matter of families and origins, the mechanics of desire and the mediations and complications of art. Within this larger frame, this paper will examine the novel's highly specific concern with the labour of writing and painting, the duplicitous and unreliable crafting of words, lines and images, and will focus on its insistence on the unstable doubleness of words, things and selves.' (Author's abstract: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/australian_literature/images/content/conferences/miller_abstracts2.pdf)