Alex Colville

David Alexander Colville (August 24, 1920 – July 16, 2013) was a Canadian painter and printmaker.

Early life and war artist

thumb|right|Colville House, [[Mount Allison University]]

David Alexander Colville was born on August 24, 1920 in Toronto, Ontario, the second son of Scottish immigrant David Harrower Colville and his wife Florence Gault. He moved with his family at age seven to St. Catharines, and then to Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1929. He attended Mount Allison University from 1938 to 1942, where he studied with Canadian Post-Impressionists like Stanley Royle and Sarah Hart, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Colville married Rhoda Wright, who he had been friends with since his first year at "Mount A", in 1942 and enlisted in the Canadian Army shortly afterwards. He enlisted in the infantry, eventually earning the rank of lieutenant. He painted in Yorkshire and took part in the Royal Canadian Navy's landings in southern France. His unit relieved the 82nd Airborne Division at Nijmegen, Netherlands, in mid-September 1944 during Operation Market Garden and remained there until the following February. Colville's painting Bodies in a Grave (1946), a scene of emaciated corpses in a Bergen-Belsen burial pit, is based on images he captured with his army-issue camera at the concentration camp.

Career

Colville had some success while still enrolled at Mount Allison, exhibiting at the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) in 1941, and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1942.

Maritime Realism came to fruition during the apex of abstract painting's ascendancy both nationally and internationally. Colville influenced a host of students that pursued a realist painting style. Norman Eastman (class of 1952), Hugh Mackenzie (class of 1953), Tom Forrestall (class of 1958), Christopher Pratt (class of 1961) Mary Pratt (class of 1961), Daniel Brown (class of 1961), Nancy Stevens (class of 1962), Ken Tomlie (class of 1962), Roger Savage (class of 1963), Suzanne Hill (class of 1964), Glenn Adams (class of 1965), and Don Pentz (class of 1966).

He left teaching to devote himself to painting and print-making full-time from a studio in his home in Sackville on York Street; this building is now named Colville House. The house was donated to Mount Allison by the Colville family. It now serves as a museum and gallery dedicated to Alex Colville's life and work under the auspice of the Owens Art Gallery.

Colville often used his immediate surroundings as subject matter, using his family as models. Throughout his career, his wife Rhoda Colville, who was also an artist and poet,

In 1966, works by Colville along with those of Yves Gaucher and Sorel Etrog represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. In 1967, Colville was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, elevated to Companion in 1982, the order's highest level. In 1973, the University of Windsor gave him an honorary doctor of laws.

Colville lived in St. Catharines, Ontario, for three years before moving to Nova Scotia. In 1973, he moved his family to his wife's hometown of Wolfville, where they lived and worked in the house that her father built and in which she was born.

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Colville aligned himself with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and was a card-carrying party member for many years. In 1981 he was appointed chancellor of Nova Scotia's Acadia University serving in that role until 1991. In 1997, he received an honorary degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Personal life and death

Colville and his wife, Rhoda Wright, had one daughter and three sons, one of whom predeceased them in 2012. They additionally had eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Wright died on December 29, 2012, after succumbing to dementia.

Colville died on July 16, 2013 at his house in Wolfville at the age of 92, after suffering from a heart condition. His funeral was held on July 24 at Acadia University's Manning Memorial Chapel.

Exhibitions

thumb|right|Alex Colville Star on [[Canada's Walk of Fame]]

Colville exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally including at the Tate Gallery in London and the Beijing Exhibition Centre in Beijing. In 1983, an international touring retrospective of his work was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). In 2003, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia organized an exhibition titled Alex Colville: Return curated by Tom Smart. Upon his death in 2013, the AGO was in the process of mounting Alex Colville, the largest exhibition of the artist's work to date which opened in 2014. painting is perhaps his best-known work. It features a woman depicted looking through binoculars, in the direction of the artist. Colville describes this work as an exploration of "the searching vision of the female" contrasted with the "stupid and passive" man, who she occludes. "The woman sees, I suppose, and the man does not." To Prince Edward Island is referenced in Korean Canadian artist Jin-me Yoon's series Long View (2017), specifically in the photograph Long View, #1, in which Yoon looks through a pair of binoculars.

The Circuit Rider

His mural in Tweedie Hall at Mount Allison University, known officially as The History of Mount Allison or The Circuit Rider.

Pacific

His 1967 painting Pacific, showing a man leaning against an open door looking out to sea while a Browning Hi-Power pistol rests on a table in the foreground, inspired one of the definitive scenes in the 1995 film Heat with actor Robert De Niro.

Man on Verandah

Painted in 1953, its sale at auction for $1.287 million set a record for a work by a living Canadian artist. Part of the estate of the late G. Hamilton Southam (1918–2008), it was sold at an auction of Canadian post-war and contemporary art by Heffel Fine Art Auction House on 25 November 2010. Expected to get up to $600,000, the price inflated during a three-way bidding war between two Canadian phone bidders and a person at the auction.

List of selected works

{| class="sortable wikitable" style="margin-left:0.5em; text-align:left"

! Name !! Year !! Current Location

|Infantry, near Nijmegen, Holland||1946||Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

|The History of Mount Allison (The Circuit Rider)||1948||Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada

|Nude and Dummy||1950||New Brunswick Museum, St John, New Brunswick, Canada

|Man on Verandah||1953||Private collection, Germany

|Horse and Train||1954||Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

|Family and Rainstorm||1955||Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York, US

|Couple on Beach||1957||National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

|Ocean Limited||1962||Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

|Skater||1964||Museum of Modern Art, New York City, New York, US

|To Prince Edward Island||1965||National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

|Pacific||1967||Private collection, Canada

|Dog and Bridge||1976||Private collection, Canada; sold in 2020 for $2.4 million

|Dog and Priest||1978||Private collection, Canada

|Target Pistol and Man||1980|| Private collection, Canada

|Cyclist and Crow||1981||Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

|Black Cat||1996||Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada

|Waterville||2003||Private collection, Canada

Works in other media

In 1965, Colville was commissioned to design the images on the Canadian 1867–1967 centennial commemorative coin set. The set consists of the following designs: Rock dove on 1 cent coin, rabbit on 5 cent coin, mackerel on 10 cent coin, lynx on 25 cent coin, wolf on 50 cent coin and goose on the 1 dollar coin.

On 22 March 2002 Canada Post issued 'Church and Horse, 1964, Alex Colville' in the Masterpieces of Canadian art series. The stamp was designed by Pierre-Yves Pelletier based on a painting Church and Horse (1964) by Alex Colville. The $1.25 stamps are perforated 13 X 13.5 and were printed by Ashton-Potter Limited.

Several of Colville's paintings appear in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining, including Woman and Terrier (1963), Horse and Train (1954), Hound in Field (1958), Dog, Boy, and St. John River (1958), and Moon and Cow (1963).

Writings

Alexander Colville, "A Tribute to Professor George P. Grant". Bell Lecture Series, Carleton University, Ottawa, 1989;

References

External links

Alex Colville in the Canadian Encyclopedia
Official site of Canadian artist Alex Colville
The Essence of Magic Realism – Critical Study of the origins and development of Magic Realism in art.
Alex Colville fonds at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario
Liliane and Cyril Welch fonds at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario
Robert Boyer Inch fonds at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario