Alex Colville

David Alexander Colville was a Canadian painter and printmaker.

Early life and war artist

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. He was then attached to the 3rd Canadian Division. After being in the army for two years, and because he was a fine-arts student, he was made an Official Second World War artist in May 1944. 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. He continued on to tours in the Netherlands and Germany, where he was also tasked with depicting the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Colville's painting Bodies in a Grave, 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 in 1941, and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1942. After the war, Colville returned to New Brunswick and became a faculty member with the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University, where he taught from 1946 to 1963. Colville is often cited as belonging to the Magic Realism movement, and within this he developed his own style that influenced both a regional and national art community, as teacher and founder of what would become known as Maritime Realism. By contrast to other members of the Maritime school, the composition of his work involved geometry. Often too, in his later work, he seized on the fugitive moment, imagining a hypothetical "What if" something happened in the conscious world.
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, Hugh Mackenzie, Tom Forrestall, Christopher Pratt Mary Pratt, Daniel Brown, Nancy Stevens, Ken Tomlie, Roger Savage, Suzanne Hill, Glenn Adams, and Don Pentz.
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, served as a model for a number of his celebrated works. Rhoda Colville's recreational life as a swimmer, skater, dancer, singer, pianist and cyclist was featured in her husband's pieces, often set in the landscapes and waterways of Annapolis Valley.
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

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. 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.
Alex Colville's work is found in many collections including the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University. The Owens also maintains , the private home of Colville which acts as an exhibit space for his work. Colville's work can also be found in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Cape Breton University Art Gallery in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne and the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover, Germany.

Notable works

''Infantry, near Nijmegen, Holland''

Trained as an infantry officer, he did a painting when World War II ended. Based upon numerous drawings, it was called Infantry and is now in the Canadian War Museum. It represents a platoon of Canadian soldiers spread out and marching along both sides of a road. Colville believed it conveyed his perception of war, as both heroism and enduring persistence among nature's elements and constant danger. The face of the first man is actually a portrait of the artist's father.

''Horse and Train''

This 1954 work was inspired by two lines from the poet Roy Campbell:
Horse and Train is a part of the Art Gallery of Hamilton's permanent collection; Dominion Foundries and Steel, Ltd. donated the painting in 1957. It appears on the cover of the album Night Vision by Bruce Cockburn. Alex Colville and Horse and Train are mentioned in the introduction of Nova Scotia fiction writer Barry Wood's short story Nowhere to Go published in England's Postscripts #14 in 2008.
The painting can also be seen in the film The Shining, hanging in a hallway during the doctor's visit.

''To Prince Edward Island''

This 1965 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, 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, 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

Name	Year	Current Location
Infantry, near Nijmegen, Holland	1946	Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
The History of Mount Allison	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