Leadership Quote by David Milne

Corporate boilerplate in the mouth of an artist is its own kind of surrealism. David Milne is remembered for spare, lucid paintings and watercolors that feel allergic to excess. Yet here he’s ventriloquizing the language of the boardroom: “range,” “strategy,” “end applications,” “portfolio,” “enhance each year.” The intent is plainly managerial - reassurance through breadth. It’s the cadence of someone trying to convince funders, buyers, or partners that the enterprise isn’t a fragile aesthetic project but a scalable supplier with multiple revenue streams.

That’s where the subtext lands: anxiety about precariousness. By stacking synonyms for variety (“wide range” twice, “across a range,” “different end applications”), the sentence performs diversification as a spell. Nothing specific is named because specificity would invite scrutiny; abstraction keeps the promise expandable. “Enhance each year” reads like an investor update smuggled into a creative life: growth as virtue, iteration as inevitability.

Context matters, and the dates complicate it. Milne (1882-1953) worked through a period when Canadian art was professionalizing, institutions were forming, and artists were increasingly pressed to justify themselves in market terms. Even if the quote is misattributed or drawn from a commercial setting rather than the studio, it’s culturally revealing: it shows how modern capitalism’s vocabulary colonizes creativity, turning “practice” into “product” and “experimentation” into “applications.” The line isn’t just trying to sell goods; it’s trying to sell stability - the idea that art, like industry, can promise continuous improvement on schedule.