Dear family, friends, and fans of David McLimans –

This letter is to invite you to join me in celebrating David’s life and work by contributing to a fund that will be used to recognize high school age artists who, as David did, use their talents to respond to the statement “War is NOT the Answer”. The David McLimans Memorial Art for Peace scholarship will be conducted under the auspices of Chapter 25 of Veterans for Peace in Madison and will be open to all Madison Metropolitan School District high school seniors. The purpose of the award is to assist with 1st semester tuition and expenses at Madison College.

The 2015-2016 fundraising goal is $1,200. Any funds collected over this amount will be retained for future awards….hopefully perennially. David loved perennials !

As many of you already know - or could surmise from viewing the exhibition of David’s artistic works at the Watrous Gallery this past summer – David loved art and distrusted the military.

His love of art came from within him; his mother and grandmother were his first collectors. His high school football coach, who would have preferred that he spent more time kicking than painting, was his first critic.

As a sonar operator in the U.S. Navy, his job was to detect sub-surface sounds, but it was what he saw on board ship as it navigated the western coast of South America that formed his lasting distrust of the military and disgust with US involvement in the affairs of other countries. He counted himself fortunate to have missed going to Viet Nam, but forever mourned for his Green Bay buddies who weren’t so lucky. When he came home to Wisconsin, he went to live with friends in the Richland County hill country, taught art to kids in an after school program, took a few courses at UW Platteville, and eventually decided to take his love of art seriously. He received his undergraduate degree in Minneapolis before going on to study graphics and illustration at Boston University.

Then, with a Masters in Fine Arts, pen and ink, a superb hand at drawing and detail, an intimacy with nature stemming from his boyhood on the farms and in the woods of Wisconsin, and a mind filled with satire, whimsy, paradox, and outrage, he began a career as a contributing editorial illustrator for nationally known newspapers and magazines. But, his love of form, color, and line called him in other directions as well - water color, wood carving, collage work, making masks from “junk” and delicate birds from the leaves, seeds, and stems of plants he grew or gathered.

In his last decade, he turned to writing and illustrating children’s books – Gone Fishing, Gone Wild, and Big Turtle. Much to his surprise, Gone Wild won a Caldecott Honor Award! Each one of the books is exquisite; each one is a statement about the preciousness of the natural world and is meant to be read by the only people he really believed in - children…. In his last years, he discovered the joy of cutting up maps, rearranging small pieces, wiping out boundaries , and then assembling them ( often juxtaposing ‘enemy’ territories ) into living - almost breathing, crawling, slithering, fluttering – images of endangered animal species. His last were human skulls… a statement on our precariousness?

Unfinished are two other projects that were even more personal – One, a book about a prison, 2 mice, and freedom. The other he called an anti-military alphabet in which soldiers’ bodies form the letters Alpha to Zulu .

David, my partner, was a naturalist, a veteran, a social critic, a world citizen. His inimitable artistic talent was how he expressed what drove him to laugh and lament. The David McLimans Memorial Art for Peace Scholarship will give “voice” to younger artists. It will be judged by local artists as well as a member of Madison’s Veterans for Peace Chapter 25. While the top winner will receive the cash award, all submissions will receive certificates of merit and copies of one of David’s books.

As funders you will, of course, be kept informed of the contest and will have an opportunity to meet the young artists at the annual Veterans for Peace Memorial Day event.

As I write this to you now, inviting you to honor him with this scholarship offering, I know that his work, his passions for peace-making and art, his fondness for young people and their imaginative spirit will live on.

With all best wishes,

Eva Hagenhofer