Joshua Miles was born in Ceres, South Africa. He attended Michaelis Art School at the Univercity of Cape Town where he was awarded The Michaelis Prize in his final year. He has exibited his paintings, reduction woodcuts and linocuts widely in South Africa for the past 25 years and has lived solely from his income as a full time artist. Joshua attributes his interest in printmaking to watching his aunt, artist and art historian Elsa Miles doing woodcuts when Joshua was a child and later, to Cecil Scotness who taught him the technical aspects of the medium at Michaelis. His inspiration comes from Japanese prints and the impressionists style of mark making and he is drawn to capturing how light moves over the landscape.
Joshua works with a particular printing process called "reduction". This technique creates color prints from a single block of wood or linoleum. Through a series of progressive cuts, inks and prints, the image slowly emerges while the actual block is reduced. The artist usually works from the lightest colors to the dark ones. This process necessitates important technical knowledge because it requires to preview all the work steps before even starting to cut the bloc. Indeed, once a color is printed and the next cut starts, there is no going back. It's why this method is sometimes called "the suicide printing".
