David Milne (1882-1953) dedicated his life to exploring nature and casting it into art in a variety of modernist formats. He was born into poverty in rural Ontario and remained poor all his life because of his relentless dedication to his art. For him, art was life. Nothing mattered to him as much as the enormous "kick" he felt when he was able to produce the image his artist's eye told him was there.

Milne returned to Ontario in 1929 after a twenty-five-year stay in the United States. In every place he lived his peripatetic existence, Milne created a different kind of landscape painting. In his chosen life of solitude, his mind and hand remained very much alive.

Since Milne spent as much time writing as he did painting, he provides an enormous amount of material for a life writer. His biography re-creates the texture of the artist's one-of-a-kind life and struggles, allowing a truly intimate portrait to emerge.

Vorwort
PREFACE

David Milne is one of Canada's finest artists, and in many ways he remains, sixty years after his death, an isolated figure. His pictures are usually not quite as bright as, say, many of the masterpieces by the members of the Group of Seven. Unlike them, he did not link his work with his country's national destiny. In fact, he lived much of his adult life outside his native land. He was, for long periods of time, a quasi-recluse.
Milne was also the artist as intellectual, someone who wrote about his aesthetic practice in considerable detail. In this sense, he is regarded, quite rightly, as an artist's artist. And yet few painters have been so thoroughly grounded in the strong, intense feelings that an artist can derive from his work and he wanted his viewers to experience those emotions.
For Milne, creating art was his life. Once he determined to devote his life to becoming an artist, that unfolding process dominated his existence. Put a slightly different way, his life was his art. Milne sacrificed material comfort for the thrill or kick of creating art. He is the embodiment of the notion of an artist whose life is devoted to art for art's sake. This biography is about the emotional and professional life of a man who took enormous pleasure in making art. From the outside, at first glance, Milne's life may not seem exciting, but in fact his quest was an exhilarating one in which he battled, heroically, to conquer all kinds of adversity to snare the perfect image. That search is the stuff of legend.

Who was David Milne? He was born in rural Ontario in 18811 and trained as an artist at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1912 he married Patsy Hegarty and moved to Boston Corners in upstate New York. He volunteered to serve in the Canadian Army during the First World War and worked as a war artist in England, France, and Belgium. He returned to Boston Corners in 1919 and lived in a variety of places in the surrounding areas. He returned to Canada in 1929 and painted in Temagami, Weston, and Palgrave, Ontario. He separated from his wife in 1933 and moved to Six Mile Lake. In 1938 he met his second wife, Kathleen Pavey. Their son, David, was born in 1941. In the later years of his career, he painted in Toronto, Uxbridge, Baptiste Lake, and Bancroft, where he died on December 26, 1953. Milne is best known as a landscape painter, but he was also particularly adept at still lifes (especially of flowers), interior views of rooms, and, late in his career, subject pictures.
In one attempt to define himself, Milne wrote: I have the broad, short fingers of the peasant. I have too the taste for few and simple things, extending to an almost abnormal dislike for, and impatience with, possessions that are more than bare necessities. I like to think that my leaning toward simplicity in art is a translation of hereditary thrift, of stinginess into a more attractive medium.2
David Milne, the man who reduced life to essentials, found happiness in nature: on a bright day you go outside and stand for a moment. A load falls from your shoulders. You feel thrilled, uplifted, serene, content, stimulated why?3 Trying to answer that difficult question was a pursuit to which he devoted his life.
An artist like himself, Milne believed, obtained an impression from some phase of nature. Having gained the impression, he did not attempt to reproduce the scene before his eyes. Rather, he had to discover what stirred him and to translate it into an arrangement of colour and line.4 The artist Peter Doig has put it this way: I really like it when the reduction in [Milne's] work becomes extreme: black mountains, black interiors, almost negatives of space.5
Milne idolized nature (botany was his favourite subject in high school). Its intricacies fascinated him, but he often felt that it acted like a cruel mistress who, when she wanted, could withdraw her favours. And so he assiduously courted nature. Often, he became one with nature even in moments that elicited a moment of terror alone in the bush on a dark night with a high wind, he became excited and pleased. When separated from the animals of the forest, he lamented, I miss my partners, a few chipmunks and birds and owls and porcupines.6
For Milne the landscape artist, nature was much more than mere trees, forests, mountains, and lakes. In nature, Milne saw a reflection of the divinity within himself. As an adult, he did not believe in the Presbyterian God of his childhood, but throughout his life he saw the meaning of his existence written in nature. In that sense, he was a deeply spiritual artist who distinguished between the spiritual forest and mundane trees. As a child, he was brought face to face with Infinity where anything might be and anything might happen.7 The pursuit of infinity the presence of the divine in nature b...

Autorentext
James King is the author of six novels and nine biographies, the subjects of which include William Blake, Margaret Laurence, Jack McClelland, Farley Mowat, and Lawren Harris. His biography of Herbert Read, The Last Modern, was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award. James King, who is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Zusammenfassung
2016 Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award for Non-Fiction Winner

David Milne is one of Canada's finest artists, a man whose work speaks to the intricate beauty of the world as he experienced it.

David Milne (18821953) dedicated his life to exploring nature and casting it into art in a variety of modernist formats. He was born into poverty in rural Ontario and remained poor all his life because of his relentless dedication to his art. For him, art was life. Nothing mattered to him as much as the enormous kick he felt when he was able to produce the image his artist's eye told him was there.