David Milne

David Milne Synopsis

This beautifully illustrated book documents the life and work of one of Canada's greatest modern painters. David Milne's (1882-1953), vast body of work shows him to be an artist of true originality and vision. Like the members of the Group of Seven, Milne primarily chose landscape as his subject matter. However, his true subject was the process of perception and representation, reducing his painting to its essentials and infusing it with his own distinctive modern sensibility. Drawing on paintings in Canadian public and private collections and on photographs and on Milne's own writings, the book presents an account of one man's spiritual and emotional voyage into modernity - from the bustling sidewalks of New York to the war-torn landscapes of northern France as an official war artist and back again to the woods, lakes, fields and skies of north-eastern USA and Canada. Pivoting on Milne's war art, the aftermath of which he recorded to sensitively and which brought a heightened sense of formal discipline to his work, the book follows the change in Milne's approach from the Post-Impressionist style of his New York years, with its vivid colours dynamic brushstrokes, to the more distilled visual language of his later work. With more than one hundred works in oil and watercolour, never-before-published photographs and drawings by the artist, this book provides unique and personal insights into this innovative artist and an appreciation of one of Canada's most sophisticated modern painters.

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