Danny Miller, entrusted with safeguarding his famous father’s legacy upon his premature death in 1998 at age 49, grew up in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan. As an adult, he would occasionally spend weekends in the Catskills with friends, which led to his purchasing a sprawling and bucolic 13-acre property in the heart of Accord.

“My goal is to get my father’s work in more people’s faces, in more galleries, so people can hang it on their walls, so it is not in a warehouse collecting dust,” Miller said.

Danny’s father was the German-born painter Nachume Miller, who emigrated from Israel and had his first exhibit at the Guggenheim at age 27. His early work often reflected the trauma and pain of having had parents who survived the Holocaust. Casting shadows of a tormented stream of consciousness on sometimes-enormous canvases, the largest spanning 181 feet, it’s obvious how heavily this experience weighed on his mind.

Miller spent much time in his father’s studio observing and being mentored by the man who, he said, was single-minded in his quest to evolve as a painter and a person.

“I idolized my father and thought I would also become a painter,” Miller said.

Miller studied painting and art history at UCLA, but he soon realized that his path would not mirror his father’s. Instead, he established his company, Hightide, as one of the top 18 creative design firms in New York City. Hightide provides design services, art direction, brand identity and communication consulting to clients such as Mercedes Benz and Nike.

Miller and his wife, Jill Cole, settled in Kerhonkson in 2014 after deciding the city’s ultra-competitive battle of getting kids into good schools was not something they wanted to subject their children to. After their second child was born, the family decided to look for a larger home to accommodate their growing family. They settled on a charming place overlooking ponds, orchards and visiting herons.

Their son and daughter enrolled in the Acorn Waldorf School, where as Miller describes it, students spend the greater part of their day outdoors, even napping in hammocks in the winter. Miller likes that his children are connected to nature and learning takes place in an organic, spontaneous manner.

Miller’s wife is studying to become an herbalist. Cole said she is very much in tune with nature, and the ability to plant herbs and other crops was one of the reasons behind buying so much land. They would like to grow as much as they can off the land and harvest it for plant medicine. Miller considers his land purchase in Accord a long-term investment for his family.

“We want to work the land, make it work for us and build a barn to house my father’s work so that it is closer to me,” states Miller.

For Miller, who divides his time between Accord and New York City, life in Accord helps him feel grounded and more connected to his family.

“Being more meditative and reflective is something I benefit from here. It is restorative and puts me in the right mindset,” he said.

It also, he said, helps him to tap into his creativity. It was during the pandemic when they were living in Accord full-time that he was able to finally compile a book of his father’s sketchbook pages, “Nachume Miller: Behind the Painting.”

It wasn’t until he started archiving his father’s work, organizing it and getting it into some sort of chronological order that he could see how the oeuvre ran the entire color spectrum, beginning with the darker tones of the early years and ending with the lighter, more vibrant final works that seem to suggest he may have healed from his earlier trauma.

“[The archiving] was something that I was really proud of that I was able to do,” Miller said.

Nachume Miller’s work has been absent from the public eye since his death 20 years ago with no one representing or pushing his art forward. Now, Miller and his family are currently in conversations with galleries and museums to do showings of his work.

For a son whose love for his father endures through the years, he has kept his promise to preserve his father’s legacy by honoring him through touching archival projects and bringing Nachume Miller’s intense work to the attention of a new generation of art lovers.