But where did all of this begin? In middle school—the sixth grade, specifically—with a great teacher. “I enjoyed drawing in the way that I think a lot of kids do,” the 23-year-old recalls on a recent Zoom call from Milan. (Her parents were creative people in the general sense, her mother a wonderful cook and her father an amateur photographer.) But at school, one Mrs. Hoover “taught actual painting technique,” McMillan explains. “She helped me to refine the coordination that it takes to look at an image and really sort of understand, what are you seeing? As opposed to just freewheeling.” That rigor lit a spark, and when her family eventually moved from East Texas to upstate New York, McMillan enrolled in the fine-arts program at her public high school. But there she was somewhat less inspired by the instruction, finding her art teachers’ standards frustratingly limiting: A painting wasn’t finished until it had a background, for example, and she was discouraged from mixing a little water into her acrylics the way she liked to do.
Asked what kind of art she was looking at and responding to at the time—which artists were informing her fledgling creative vision—McMillan pauses. “I wouldn’t say that I was particularly tapped into art history or culture at large in high school, but I do remember I loved Lucian Freud,” she replies at last. “I’m trying to think if there’s anybody else. As much as I want to say that—I don’t know—I loved Andrew Wyeth, I didn’t know who the fuck anybody was. When I was in high school and middle school, I just lived and died by Rookie Yearbook.”Photographed by Heather Sten Needless to say, she blithely flouts all of those old conventions now—but after dropping out of high school and beginning to model, McMillan stopped painting for a while. (In the interim, her medium of choice was graphite pencil.) “I think it took a couple of years to come back to the idea that I can make art truly for myself,” she says. “If other people like it, fantastic—that’s incredibly meaningful to me—but if nobody in the world liked it, I would still do it and I would still love it.”
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