Miles was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, of Anglo-Irish parents. Miles' father was a Royal Naval officer. Educated in England, he spent a year at Essex University studying Art History, and then many years later a year at Chelsea School of Art studying painting, always continuing painting as an autodidact. In between he worked backstage in West End theatres, on oil rigs in the North Sea and on tour as a rigger with musicians like Dire Straits, Genesis, Rod Stewart.

The Forest Group and Aran Series are a response to landscape, where he lives in the Forest of Dean and the Aran Islands off the West Coast of Ireland. The paintings developed from years of work, charcoal drawings, photography, painting, walking, meditating.

He was inspired by Rowley's Principles of Chinese Painting : " The painter begins with pictorial reality and then suggests the reality of spirit beyond form with a flow and effortlessness which results in indescribable unity. We pass from the tangible and immeasurable into the intangible and incommensurable and yet experience the intelligibility of the whole which, at the same time, is the wellspring of the mysteries, the wedding of spirit and matter ." and agrees with Oscar Wilde De Profundis 1905: "I am conscious that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things. The Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life, the Mystical in Nature - that is what I am looking for. It is absolutely necessary for me to find it somewhere. "

The drawing is concerned less with perfection than with process. The page is a monochrome panel with the rigour of rectangular structure, with elemental colour exploring the energy and dynamics of line and gesture, a place where it is possible to lose the self and move to a meditative place, the hand exploring a given space, returning to a pre-linguistic state showing the consciousness of existing and the flow of time. The work needs time spent in front of it, for the eye to follow the string in the labyrinth.

This way of drawing came from staying for hours, days, in the woods where he lives. He started using landscape - external topography, interior mapping. Every action counts, the Zen principle of Daily Life Practise: giving yourself entirely to what is being done - you can wash up with anger and resentment or make it a sacred act, it is part of a whole - a stone in a pond, the ripples disturb or calm.

Miles says he walked away from Rembrandt's Rest on the Flight to Egypt in Dublin with his heart singing. He remembers the painting as being about ten inches by eight inches and he thought if he could achieve that - each mark a prayer. If it works you stand before the piece for a time and come away changed. It should resonate - that is what great art is about surely?

He has had many influences: Sung Dynasty landscapes, Zen painting and calligraphy, those beautiful screens by Shubun and Sesshu, Mu-Chi. Mediaeval Russian and Syrian manuscripts and psalters. Rembrandt's and Giacometti's drawings, Cezanne, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, Rauschenburg, Beuys, Richard Smith, Ian McKeever, the essays of the American poet Gary Snyder.

The later work is marked by a turning away from external imagery to where drawing/painting become a meditative state - a process informed by a long interest in Zen through to the writings of the Jesuit William Johnston, both on The Cloud of Unknowing (a C14 English spiritual classic) and on Zen and its history. Then the Desert Fathers, particularly the Hesychast tradition of Mount Athos and Eastern Orthodoxy, the Syrian Fathers.

Having lived and worked in seclusion for many years now, he says he "is less aware of the latest and most modern work. There are good and bad consequences to that. There's still much to do."

A quote he enjoys from a Brice Marden catalogue:

I've heard it said,
Painting is dead.
Too much mouth
Not enough eyes. *

*Chant often uttered by artists on completion of a new piece. It is accompanied by a gleeful soft step dance too complicated to define because it means defining joy.