My mother, June Miles, who has died aged 96, was known as a landscape, portrait and still life artist. In a review in the Cornishman in 2004, Frank Ruhrmund wrote of her that “… there is a sense of peace in her work that passes all understanding … An artist who has never courted publicity, never owned a trumpet of her own let alone blown it, June Miles must be one of the most retiring, unassuming, and consequently one of the most underrated of the many artists practising in Penwith.”
Born in London, the daughter of William Miles, a Royal Marine engineer, and his wife, Constance (nee Temple), June attended Portsmouth high school and later gained a place at the Slade School of Art in London aged 17, to study painting under Randolph Schwabe. There she met the painter Paul Feiler. They married in 1946 and had three children, Christine, Helen and me.
June and Paul divorced in 1967, and in 1978 she married the sculptor Paul Mount. Perhaps ahead of her time, she displayed an unwavering drive and determination that sustained her work and prevented her quality as a painter from being overshadowed by marriage to two such established artists.
Living in Bristol in the 1960s June gained a reputation as an outstanding portraitist. Holidays were spent in Cornwall, where she concentrated on landscape, and she became part of the painting community mixing with artists and their families such as Peter Lanyon, Bryan Winter and Patrick Heron. After her divorce, June moved permanently to St Just, but continued to teach at the West of England College of Art (1966-1976), driving up to Bristol weekly in her red Citroën Dyane.
To pay for petrol she set up her own business delivering crates of Newlyn lobsters to a dozen or so Bristol restaurants, including Keith Floyd’s bistro in Clifton. In her St Just studio she worked on still life, and for a few months a year June and Paul Mount stayed in their French property, June painting the southern landscape of the Languedoc and Spain. During these years she took her easel to remote parts of both the French and Cornish countryside, at one time being moved on from a Cornish lane by an irate local vicar.
June was a medallist at the Women’s International art club Paris (1968), and her work is in permanent collections in the Plymouth and Bristol City art galleries and in the Royal West of England Academy (RWA). She had a long series of solo shows including at the RWA, the Beaux Arts gallery, Bath, the Newlyn gallery, the Penwith gallery, St Ives, and the Lemon Street gallery, Truro.
When asked for her thoughts on painting for the RWA website, June commented: “Relationships of colours and forms are the building blocks of a painting. I use colour against colour much as a musician will place note against note, using the recessive and dominant colours to describe forms within space … In the end one has to find one’s own way of solving the problems one has set for oneself.”
June was known for her exceptional warmth and steady kindness to family and friends.
Paul Mount died in 2009. June is survived by her children, five grandchildren, Ben, Paul, Rachael, Eva and Hettie, and a great-granddaughter, Tima.
