ON A BEAUTIFUL DAY last summer, I stood atop the broken concrete spillway, five metres above the creek that meanders through Ken and Gillian Danby's acreage near Guelph, Ontario. Danby strolled toward me with his hand outstretched in greeting. "I don't give a lot of interviews," he said at the outset. "I'm a private guy. But I'm happy to see you brought your cameras. There is much to capture here." As we drank coffee on his patio, Danby - one of the world's great realist painters, a member of both the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada - talked first about the new sun canopy he'd just installed. He found it durable and aesthetically pleasing, and he explained that he was going to improve it by adding sun-shield blinds. "If I can't buy it at Canadian Tire or Lee Valley [Tools], I probably don't need it," he noted. "Living in the country, I need a lot of stuff from those stores." He was as down to earth and real and Canadian as his paintings, and our conversation drifted from his art and his projects on the acreage to national affairs. The interview stretched on through lunch with the Danbys under the canopy, and a leisurely tour of the grounds, concluding only when he had to leave at 5 p.m. for his daily staff meeting. Danby's art and his life were inseparable. He didn't confine his art to the studio. I discovered there were few places on the couple's 40-acre property, home and production offices untouched by his artistic vision. If Danby had been able to choose the circumstances of his death, he may well have selected Algonquin Park, where he died suddenly September 23, 2007 while on a canoe trip. He mentioned in our interview how much the park fascinated him and inspired his artworks. He was also influenced by the life and paintings of Tom Thomson, an associate of the Group of Seven painters. Thomson died mysteriously in Algonquin Park in 1917, presumably of drowning. Danby's 1997 oil, "Algonquin," is an homage to Thomson. Water is a recurring subject in Danby's paintings. When we talked, the apparently robust 67-year-old had recently completed the painting "Cavalier du Soleil." In this 2006 egg tempera, Gillian Danby, his favourite model, is riding her horse amidst the turquoise waves of the Caribbean. Here, and in the celebrated 1988 "Bali Mist," and in "Island Reach," a 2003 work depicting Lake Huron and the rocks of Head Island, water glimmers and has a translucency as though captured in a photograph. "It only appears real," Danby said. "Things I portray don't really happen just the way I paint them. I use a lot of photographs in my painting, but I put the images together the way the human brain knits together a memory. The paintings are an experience from my own mind." He perfected his depictions of water over time. "Much of it was watching out here at home, by the millstream," he said. "Watching what it does, the way light and weather treats it. Learning it." Danby watched and learned from the 1850s flour mill as well, transforming it, in a 40-year labour of love, into a gracious and beautiful home. Heartened by having received his first major commission, the young artist had driven across Southern Ontario in search of a home and studio.