John Milne - Artist

Sculptor and artist

WANTED ……. we are currently looking to acquire work by this artist so do contact us if you have one to sell.

John Milne , the post war artist is best known for his time in St Ives, Cornwall but he was actually a Lancashire lad born in Eccles , who started out his studies by transferring from his course in electrical engineering at Salford to the art course. Milne became , in his short life, possibly the most interesting of the sculptors associated with St. Ives. He was a modernist abstract sculptor who was influenced by the Cornish landscape, and later also the architecture of Greece and North Africa. Milne’s early work was directly carved in stone, but from 1966 he started experimenting with metals and learned cold casting methods for bronze and aluminium. Milne worked as an unpaid apprentice to Barbara Hepworth working with her assistant Denis Mitchell. In 1957 he purchased Trewyn House, a large property in St Ives next door to Hepworth’s studio with views of the sea below. Like most great sculptors his original ideas were put into drawings like the ones we have for sale here at Blondes Fine Art in Hertfordshire. Perhaps his most well known work was ‘Gnathos’ which in Greek means jaws. There were many drawings for ‘Gnathos’, of which all but two were destroyed. From the drawings John Milne went on to trial different mediums and ‘Gnathos’ was made in wood then two editions, each of three casts. In one edition the bronze is patinated in another polished bronze . The artist wrote: ‘I often cast works with more than one type of finish in order to be absolutely sure that the final result is the most perfect that I can obtain. I consider the polished bronze of Gnathos as the ultimate fulfilment of my original idea. But to start the process it was the drawings and the ones offered here are some of his best with great provenance .

Sadly John Milne died at the early age of 47 in 1978. His work is to be found in many of the major public and private collections.