Harland Miller’s Tonight We Make History (Lilac) belongs to his celebrated series of fictional Penguin book covers - works that pair deadpan, often ambiguous titles with painterly abstraction and rich colour fields. At once literary and painterly, nostalgic and subversive, this print plays on the tension between word and image, between the familiar comfort of a book spine and the emotional charge of colour.
“The text is always the same,” Miller explains, “but if the painting changes, that changes the way you read the text.” It’s this interplay that gives Tonight We Make History its lasting power - colour alters tone, abstraction shifts meaning, and viewers are left to project their own narratives onto the phrase. Is it hopeful? Ironic? Triumphant? Melancholic? The answer lies in the palette - and in the viewer.
Though Miller no longer paints these works, he returns to them through printmaking. “I haven’t made these in years,” he notes, “but I like to revisit the series through prints.” This particular edition, then, becomes both a continuation and a farewell - a nod to the enduring resonance of the phrase, and a quiet suggestion that the story may be ending.
Boldly introspective yet open to personal interpretation, Tonight We Make History is a meditation on time, language, and the stories we tell ourselves - framed in the quietly iconic language of the book cover.