RedApple Cigarettes

RedApple Cigarettes (2020)

Acrylic on canvas, 24 × 24 in

In RedApple Cigarettes, G.M. Miller depicts a fictional cigarette, suspended against an unyielding white background. The imagery references Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup paintings—the comfort of repetition, the familiarity of branding—while also nodding to Warhol’s signed Marlboro box, where the act of signing an everyday object became an unintended artwork. The fictional Red Apple brand, borrowed from Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic universe, injects a layer of stylized danger beneath its playful, saturated palette.

The piece was built slowly in layers, with the white background repainted repeatedly to achieve a clinical stillness, allowing the object itself to dominate the space. The small signature in the lower corner echoes Warhol’s gesture, suggesting that authorship, intention, and fixation can elevate the mundane into something loaded with meaning.

For Miller, this work externalizes the persistent mental presence of cigarettes—the sweetness of temptation rendered physical. By painting the object of addiction, the artist gains a measure of distance from it, transforming an internal struggle into a visible form that can be examined rather than obeyed.