A Canadian artist, Gordon Milne was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1953. He attended McMaster University where he majored in printmaking and sculpture and graduated with a BFA in 1974.
Early in his career Milne worked as a printmaker — producing original drawings, etchings, woodcuts and linocuts that he exhibited and sold privately to individuals and corporations. During this period he was represented by Highstreet Gallery in Calgary and Paperworks Gallery in Vancouver.
In 1982, while Gordon was in Australia, a devastating flood at Highstreet Gallery ravaged most of his artwork leaving little to show from the 70's. At this transition Milne shifted his attention to graphic design, founding Dream On Art & Design. While operating his design business Milne continued to work quietly and diligently on his own artwork splitting his time between the fine arts and the graphic design worlds.
Milne's new studio practice altered his focus from printmaking to painting — allowing him to explore the possibilities of a media and a subject matter he had not yet considered. Turning to a figure-based compositional foundation he began to consider complex relationships between men and women, sons and daughters, athletes and dancers, cross dressers and transgendered persons — representations that reflect an intense examination of everyday life, of our varying lifestyles and of our place in the world.
These portraits incorporate an intricate arrangement of different shapes and colours, all of which relate and interplay with one another — subtly inviting the viewer to identify the subject's personality based on optical cues. These monumental portraits are Milne's biggest accomplishment and his trademark today.
At present, Milne is working on a series of commissioned private portraits as well as portraits of dancers with the Alberta Ballet. He is also actively involved in the Sport Heroes Project — a series of portraits of Canadian Olympians in association with the Canadian Sport Centre.