flower isn't a flower to david b. milne. he is the flower.
david b. milne is obsess with the process of his work that the subject of his paintings are irrelevant.
I was on Twitter and for the first time, I was going through my Twitter feed. I noticed that some users are just tweeting quotes. In my mind, how are they getting away with that? Just a quote. Unbelievable. It’s not even their quote. I understand that twitter are meant for mini-blogs/tweets but is that enough to engage people? At least for me, it doesn't my style.
Since I am still working on the David B. Milne collection, it would only be suitable that I find a David B. Milne quote and tweet it. Lets see if I can get away with that. But, that isn’t the reason why I wrote this blog.
As I googled David B. Milne quote, this image popped out of my screen.
No way. David never paints flowers? huh. That was hard to believe because our landing page consisted of some flowers in a garden (if you hover over the big square) which were painted by David. Is that image of a painting authentic? Did the National Gallery of Canada get this quote wrong? Was David B. Milne a “troll”? Or did I misinterpret that quote?
Enticed by my curiosity, I clicked on the link. I noticed that it was just the beginning of a passage.
"Do you like flowers? So do I, but I never paint them. I didn't even see the hepaticas. I saw, instead, an arrangement of the lines, spaces, hues, values and relations that I habitually use. That is, I saw one of my own pictures, a little different from ones done before, changed slightly, very slightly, by what I saw before me.'" David B. Milne 1936
First, I noticed that the quote is in italics. I made a google search “are quotes italicized”. Yes, they are if they are from the original source. The more I know.
Second, David truly didn’t care about what he was drawing but the process behind it. By the end of his painting process, there would be no flower; it would only be David B. Milne.
If that doesn’t make sense, lets consider a different scenario. When you see a vacuum cleaner, there are so many versions of them. But when you see a Dyson, you don’t see it as a vacuum cleaner, you see it as a Dyson. If you don’t know about how the Dyson Vacuum was made, he went through over 5000 prototypes, 5 years of testing to get to the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner. He created his own category of vacuum cleaners.
With an unusual comparison with paintings and vacuums, the iterations to get to a result can be the brand itself.
Flower isn't a flower to David B. Milne. He is the flower.