David Milne

At the age of twenty-one, David Milne left Canada to study art at the Art Students League in New York from 1903-05. He supported himself by doing commercial design and painted in his spare time. In 1917, he served the Canadian army in Europe.  Afterwards, he painted for the Canadian War Records, and then moved back to New York.

Milne is credited with inventing the multiple-plate color drypoint process in 1922, when he was living in rural New York State (1918-1928). The description of Milne’s early experiments in the medium, in which he used zinc roofing tiles, a darning needle, and a laundry wringer for a press, evokes a wonderful image of determination and resourcefulness against conditions of poverty and isolation.

Drypoint is a form of printmaking in which the artist uses a hard metal point or diamond-tipped needle to scratch a line directly into a metal plate. (In etching, the line is drawn through an acid-resistant coating and acid is then used to bite the image into the plate.) The burr that the etching tool creates results in the characteristically soft or fuzzy drypoint line during the printing process. It was this soft line that appealed to Milne, who sought to create an effect like watercolors in his prints.