----
WENDY ELLIOTT: Alex Colville's iconic images featured in Toronto show
Wendy Elliott
Published on August 25, 2014
© Courtesy of A.C. Fine Art
Seven Crows, 1980, captures a Cornwallis River view.
Wishing I was in Toronto this week to stroll through four vast galleries containing iconic images from Alex Colville’s 60 years of paintings and prints. There are close to 100 works on the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).
Colville, who died last July, spent over 40 years in Wolfville and many of his best known images were painted locally, so I had fun recently chatting with Shiralee Hudson-Hill, who helped plan the exhibition that runs until January, about what’s in and what’s not.
Landscape, whether it was the marshes around Sackville, N.B. or the dykes of Kings County, had a long-lasting impact on the renowned artist. There are images like dark crows flying above pastures and the overpass looking toward Cape Blomidon.
“A deep sense of place was critical to the way he approached his work and many of his most recognizable paintings were inspired by his surroundings,” Hudson-Hill noted.
But Colville was also a keen observer of people. Hudson-Hill, who attended Colville’s alma mater Mount Allison, says we would recognize many of the paintings, such as wife Rhoda loading groceries in front of the post office.
She told me that some rarely seen paintings, like Professor of Romance Languages, are included, adding that in many of his images tragedy is not far off. That painting features an Acadia prof, who lost his family in the Holocaust, walking in front of the university heating plant smoke stack. Colville, a war artist, made a clever juxtaposition with that painting, but most often Hudson-Hill said he captured a particular moment in time.
Hudson-Hill also told me how, while Colville was rooted in the Maritimes, his images were out in the world as book (Alice Munro) or record covers, or in movies, of which there were many. Apparently Wes Anderson was a big fan (see his flick Moon Rise).
“These are iconic scenes of Canadiana,” she said. “Many Canadians grew up in an urban setting, but many also grew up in rural communities like Amherst and Sackville.”
“His work resonated deeply with Nova Scotians, Canadians and also internationally,” she said. “It’s hard sometimes in a very Canadian way to toot our own horn. Here is one of our own, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century and it’s time for a big retrospective. The last one was 13 years ago.”
He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982 and won a Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award in 2003. I remember how gracious Colville was about returning calls when such awards were made if one took care not to call during his morning painting hours.
This winter the Colville exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Alas it won’t be coming to Wolfville and I’m sad there are still no talks going on about a way to honour this artist locally.
There is a virtual exhibit that the AGO has mounted at www.welcometocolville.ca.
http://www.novanewsnow.com/Opinion/Columnists/2014-08-25/article-3847371/WENDY-ELLIOTT%3A-Alex-Colvilles-iconic-images-featured-in-Toronto-show/1
WENDY ELLIOTT: Alex Colville's iconic images featured in Toronto show
Wendy Elliott
Published on August 25, 2014
© Courtesy of A.C. Fine Art
Seven Crows, 1980, captures a Cornwallis River view.
Wishing I was in Toronto this week to stroll through four vast galleries containing iconic images from Alex Colville’s 60 years of paintings and prints. There are close to 100 works on the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).
Colville, who died last July, spent over 40 years in Wolfville and many of his best known images were painted locally, so I had fun recently chatting with Shiralee Hudson-Hill, who helped plan the exhibition that runs until January, about what’s in and what’s not.
Landscape, whether it was the marshes around Sackville, N.B. or the dykes of Kings County, had a long-lasting impact on the renowned artist. There are images like dark crows flying above pastures and the overpass looking toward Cape Blomidon.
“A deep sense of place was critical to the way he approached his work and many of his most recognizable paintings were inspired by his surroundings,” Hudson-Hill noted.
But Colville was also a keen observer of people. Hudson-Hill, who attended Colville’s alma mater Mount Allison, says we would recognize many of the paintings, such as wife Rhoda loading groceries in front of the post office.
She told me that some rarely seen paintings, like Professor of Romance Languages, are included, adding that in many of his images tragedy is not far off. That painting features an Acadia prof, who lost his family in the Holocaust, walking in front of the university heating plant smoke stack. Colville, a war artist, made a clever juxtaposition with that painting, but most often Hudson-Hill said he captured a particular moment in time.
Hudson-Hill also told me how, while Colville was rooted in the Maritimes, his images were out in the world as book (Alice Munro) or record covers, or in movies, of which there were many. Apparently Wes Anderson was a big fan (see his flick Moon Rise).
“These are iconic scenes of Canadiana,” she said. “Many Canadians grew up in an urban setting, but many also grew up in rural communities like Amherst and Sackville.”
“His work resonated deeply with Nova Scotians, Canadians and also internationally,” she said. “It’s hard sometimes in a very Canadian way to toot our own horn. Here is one of our own, one of the greatest painters of the 20th century and it’s time for a big retrospective. The last one was 13 years ago.”
He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982 and won a Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award in 2003. I remember how gracious Colville was about returning calls when such awards were made if one took care not to call during his morning painting hours.
This winter the Colville exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Alas it won’t be coming to Wolfville and I’m sad there are still no talks going on about a way to honour this artist locally.
There is a virtual exhibit that the AGO has mounted at www.welcometocolville.ca.
http://www.novanewsnow.com/Opinion/Columnists/2014-08-25/article-3847371/WENDY-ELLIOTT%3A-Alex-Colvilles-iconic-images-featured-in-Toronto-show/1
-------------------
AUGUST 22- 2014- CANADA MACLEAN'S MAGAZINE
Unpacking The Real Alex Colville
He is iconic, yet misjudged. A magnificent new show unpacks a master of
exquisite realism
August 22, 2014
Photograph by Liz Sullivan
“The woman sees, I suppose, and the man does not,”
Alex Colville once remarked of To Prince Edward Island, one of his most
celebrated works. Like the painting itself—a woman on a ferry, her face hidden
behind binoculars she directs at the viewer, she herself hiding the man behind
her—the comment was typical of Colville, obscuring not only the intense thought
and preparation that went into his works, but how constant a theme it
represented. For an artist who painted so often and so starkly about seeing
(which dogs, crows and some people, mostly women, can in his work) and not
seeing (most people, especially men, can’t), Colville can be awfully hard
himself for Canadians to rightly perceive.
Partly it’s the ubiquity of his best-known works,
reproduced everywhere, from the iconic Horse and Train that adorns a Bruce
Cockburn album cover to The Elm Tree
at Horton Landing on the front jacket of a book
of Alice Munro short stories to the coins that once jingled in our pockets
(Colville designed a Centennial Year series for the mint). But primarily,
suggests Andrew Hunter, curator of the Art
Gallery of Ontario exhibitionAlex Colville,
opening in Toronto on Aug. 23, it’s the technically exquisite realism, falsely
familiar yet hardly soothing, that can mislead.
Colville was a realist, the curator says, “because
he knew that things can always go horribly wrong, that they were always on a
fine balance. You can viewWoman in a Bathtub in multiple ways, from loving intimate moment to something far
worse.” Ann Kitz, 65, Colville’s youngest child and only daughter, says her
father “was a pragmatist, and not inclined to think people were inherently
good. He believed evil existed.”
A realist, in short, not because he painted
representationally, but in part at least because he’d been to the Nazi
concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen as a young war artist, in May 1945, when
its emaciated victims were still dying by the thousands. Last fall, months
after Colville’s death at 92 in July 2013, when Hunter and Kitz were going
through Colville’s studio cabinets, they found “a startling watercolour of
bodies from Bergen-Belsen,” says Hunter. Colville had not sent it to the
Canadian War Museum with his other army works, but had kept it, evidence of a
lifelong habit of keeping bad experiences tucked away but close at hand.
The AGO’s magnificent show, accompanied by Hunter’s
superbly written catalogue, will surely strip away any patina of ordinariness
Colville might have in the consciousness of his countrymen. Containing more
than 100 of his 150-odd paintings, along with dozens of drawings and sketches,
it will be the most Colville in one place ever. And it will show him as an
important modern artist, Hunter says, “how relevant he is to the contemporary
conversation on image and image-making.”
There will be “pairings,” as the AGO calls them,
with Wes Anderson, who restaged To PEI in
his 2012 filmMoonrise Kingdom, and with the Coen brothers, whose staging of Javier Bardem near
the end of No Country for Old Men (2007) echoed Colville’s famously arresting self-portrait Target Pistol and Man. The four
Colvilles featured on the walls of the resort hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s
seminal 1980 horror film, The Shining,
will be set off. There will be additional pieces by living artists to accompany
Colville’s own, including a biographical comic by David Collier and works by Gu
Xiong, who was an art student in China when the Canadian government sponsored a
Colville exhibition there in 1984. “Gu went to see it,” Hunter recounts. “Then
he took a copy of Horse and
Train to his studio, like every other
art student in China. ‘We used to say,’ Gu would tell me, ‘We were the horse
and China was the train.’ Five years later, it was more they were the lone guy
and China was the tank.”
Alex Colville. To Prince Edward Island, 1965.
Acrylic emulsion on masonite. 61.9 x 92.5 cm. Purchased 1966.
National Gallery of Canada (no. 14954). © A.C.Fine Art Inc
National Gallery of Canada (no. 14954). © A.C.Fine Art Inc
Director Wes Anderson restaged Colville’s To Prince
Edward Island in his film, Moonrise Kingdom. (Focus Features/Everett
Collection)
Hunter thinks the Chinese government, like so many
others, was fooled by Colville’s everyday subject matter. “They probably
thought it was ‘safe,’ a variety of the sort of socialist realism they were
used to. Classic Colville: always sneaking in under your first impressions.”
Like the horse in Church and
Horse (1964), the painting Hunter
thinks is most illustrative of Colville’s mix of local core and outside
eruption, of menace and order. “The church, from the 1860s, old and rundown, is
still there, near Hastings, N.S., but any local will tell you that horse is
definitely not from around here.” The charger, which looks like it’s about to
destroy the tottering remains of the past, is the riderless horse from John F.
Kennedy’s funeral, an event Colville watched attentively on TV.
It’s one of Hunter’s favourites, but the curator
has a lot of those. There’s Woman with Terrier, one of The Shining four, which Colville once
jokingly described as “my Madonna and
Child; of course in my world the child is a dog.”
Colville had “a peculiar idea of dogs,” Hunter adds. “They are sentient but
incapable of evil—they can see. People and dogs in his art represent distracted
and hyperaware capacity for evil and innocence. The woman’s face,
unsurprisingly, is hidden by the terrier. “Colville’s averted faces implicate
viewers in his works, make us feel like voyeurs. When someone in a Colville
looks directly at the viewer,” Hunter continues, “it’s as though you have
interrupted him or her, broken in on a private scene.” In Target Pistol and Man, the
gun’s barrel is on the table, but the handle is still in the air: the man isn’t
contemplating the weapon, he’s just dropped it.
Almost all this globally resonant subversion,
including all the most iconic images, emanated from a quiet corner of Maritime Canada.
There is one spectacular exception. Pacific—that disturbing painting of a man, his head
cropped off, gazing out to sea in the background and a pistol lying on an
otherwise bare table in the foreground—is “currently the most requested
reproduction,” according to Hunter. It is also the one work Colville did in
Santa Cruz, when he was a visiting artist at the University of California in
1967. “Even then,” the curator adds, “the table was brought with them from
Wolfville,” the Nova Scotia town where the Colvilles lived from 1973, in his
wife Rhoda’s family home.
There, as in Sackville, N.B., where he lived from
1946 to 1973 (teaching at Mount Allison Unversity until he quit to become a
full-time artist in 1963), Colville lived a life as orderly as the surface of
his paintings. “He was really good at balancing life and work,” recalls Kitz.
“After exercise, bath and breakfast, he’d go upstairs and work until noon—his
best hours were always eight to noon—six days a week, never on Sunday. He never
pulled all-nighters, coming downstairs haggard at breakfast.” Colville’s oldest
child, Graham, the only one born while Alex was still overseas, tells of
meeting his father for the first time. “I was over a year old and we were both
shy. I’m told his first words to me were, ‘Would you like an olive?’ My father
was not a Norman Rockwell dad—he never went to hockey practice with me, none of
that clichéd bonding. But we did have a lot of shared experiences, especialy
with sailing. Rowing, actually—we were always getting becalmed in Minas Basin.
There wasn’t much talking, but a lot of closeness.” Colville liked to make
things, says Kitz, particularly of wood: his own frames and packing cases for
his paintings, “and all my doll furniture.”
The surroundings of that tidily civilized life
provided all the forms his astonishing body of art required—pets, farm animals,
landscape, sea, boats, children and above all, his wife. Rhoda and Alex
Colville were married for more than 70 years. She was muse and subject for his
entire working life—there is a drawing of her as a teenager and she is in Woman
and Clock, his last work, painted in 2010—and she appears in drawing after
drawing, painting after painting, often naked. (As does he, several times, most
notably with a naked Rhoda inRefrigerator.)
Colville used to display his finished works in the
family home for a week or so before shipping them off. The maternal nudity
meant nothing to the children—“that was our normal,” laughs Kitz—but, in a
story Kitz suspects is growing in the telling, Rhoda had to coolly serve tea to
the local Ladies Church Auxilliary under a large portrait of her naked in a
tent. “My mother understood what my father did was fine art,” Kitz says, “but
it still made her uncomfortable sometimes.”
It’s impossible to imagine Colville’s career, let
alone his life, without Rhoda, his very ability to create seven decades of
examining images of trust and vulnerability, so many with feelings of inchoate
danger hanging over them. She died in late 2012, just half a year before her
husband. During those last months, Colville, as he once told his son Graham,
took Rhoda’s death as “a piece of information I put away in a secret place.”
1 of 9
HORSE
AND TRAIN
Alex Colville, Horse and Train, 1954. Glazed oil on
hardboard. Art Gallery of Hamilton, Gift of Dominion Foundries and Steel
Limited (Dofasco), 1957. ©A.C. Fine Art Inc.
------------------
FROM AVR COUNTRY RADIO- KENTVILLE NOVA SCOTIA-
Colville will be honoured at the AGO
By MNN. Last
updated: 2014-08-20 05:20:07
Master
painter Alex Colville is being remembered for his vast body of work that
immortalized the seemingly mundane moments of everyday life.
The Art
Gallery of Ontario will open the most comprehensive retrospective ever done on
the Maritime artist on Saturday.
Colville
died in July 2013 at age 92, leaving behind a notable artistic legacy that
included famous paintings such as "Horse and Train'' and "Target
Pistol and Man.''
The Alex
Colville exhibition runs at the A-G-O until January 4th of next year.
Alex Colville
Official site of Canadian artist Alex Colville
About
Alex Colville
The pictures of Canadian artist Alex Colville bear more affinity to
the American Precisionists of the 1930s than to photo-realism. His perfect
compositions are based on an abundance of sketches and studies, which are first
brought into an abstract, geometric scheme before drawings are made from the
live model and proportioned according to the planned format. Only then does the
slow and patient process of painting begin. Layer upon layer of thinned paint
is applied to a primed wooden panel, and the opaque surface finally sealed with
transparent lacquer. The process can often take months.Colville has devoted intensive study to European painting. According to him, it took him many years to digest the impressions gained during two days spent in the Louvre. Yet he has also been deeply impressed by the American Luminists, and not least by Hopper. Colville’s paintings are proof of the fact that a realism of content need have nothing in common with naturalism, that the serious realist does not unthinkingly reflect reality, but analyses it. It is this analytical cast of mind, Colville is convinced, that permits him to discover “myths of mundanity” — on the banks of the River Spree, by the seaside, in the circus, at sports events, on a boat or a highway, in a meadow or a swimming pool, in a telephone booth or a bedroom. Colville insists that the mythical aspect of everyday life is not reserved for authors of the secular rank of a James Joyce, but that the contemporary painter can have access to is as well.
Colville’s silent images are static. Yet practically all of them tell a story, in a brief, concise plot that does not always have a resolution. Fundamental human situations are their both simple and complex themes: loneliness, isolation, parting, work, leisure, estrangement, love. The only subliminally dramatic, often melancholy laconism of content corresponds to the absolute precision of form by which it is conveyed. Like hardly another artist, Colville maintains the difficult balance between imagination and sober calculation, formal interest and social commitment. Behind the realistic surface of his imagery lurks the surreal – but a surreal that lacks every trace of theatrical staging or borrowing from psychoanalysis, whose new myths Colville deeply mistrusts.
—From Art of the Twentieth Century, ed. Ingot.
Walther. Vol. I Taschen, Koln, 1998.
Behind his words, as behind his art, you can sense elaborate webs of
thought. And, also like his paintings, he stands quite alone, beyond category.
It’s impossible to speak with him for a few hours without feeling his powerful
sense of self. He is, it seems, a free man.
—Robert Fulford, Regarding Alex Colville,
Saturday Night, 17 June, 2000.
· Pages
· News
Alex Colville died peacefully at home on July 16th,
2013.
Rhoda
Colville, a gifted artist and witty poet, dies at age 91 —Dec 31, 2012, Chronicle
Herald
-----
OVER 18 PHOTOS
Alex Colville retrospective opening at Art Gallery of Ontario
More than 100 works by the iconic Canadian painter on display from Aug. 23 to Jan. 4. 2015
CBC
News Posted: Aug 19, 2014 5:00 AM ET Last Updated: Aug 19,
2014 5:00 AM ET
Related Stories
- Alex Colville remembered for honesty, passion as painter
- Looking back at Alex Colville
- Alex Colville works on exhibit at Mount Allison
- Alex Colville's alma mater to unveil silkscreen prints
- Alex Colville's gift
External Links
(Note: CBC does not
endorse and is not responsible for the content of external links.)
More than 100 works by iconic
Canadian painter Alex Colville are on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario
beginning this week in the largest exhibition ever of the late artist's
work.Doors open to the public Saturday, the day before what would have been the artist's 94th birthday.
Colville, who died last July in his home in Wolfville, N.S., is known for his moody and hyper-realist creations. He painted personal subject matter, drawing inspiration from the world around him.
A veteran of the Second World War, Colville painted Allied activities throughout Europe. He was also made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982 and won a Governor General's Visual and Media Arts Award in 2003.
Curators gathered pieces spanning Colville's entire career, such as the famed paintings, from museums and private collections.
The AGO retrospective spans Colville's entire career with pieces such as the famed paintings Horse and Train, To Prince Edward Island and Woman in Bathtub. Gathered from museums and private collections, many of the pieces have never been shown publicly.
Alex
Colville was born in Toronto in 1920. He died at home in Wolfville, N.S., on
July 16 2013. He was 92.
The exhibition will also
pair Colville's works with those of pop culture figures who were
inspired by the painter, including filmmakers Sarah Polley and Stanley Kubrick,
artists Itee Pootoogook and Mary Pratt, and Nobel Prize-winning author Alice
Munro.It's not the first time Colville's paintings have been featured at the AGO. The gallery held a retrospective of his works in 1983 that subsequently travelled to six galleries in Canada and Germany.
The show runs until Jan. 4, 2015. http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/alex-colville-retrospective-opening-at-art-gallery-of-ontario-1.2739381
----
HISTORY-
Explore Alex Colville’s life & work
1920
August
David Alexander Colville is born to David Harrower and Florence Colville in Toronto.
1927
Colville family moves to St. Catharines, Ontario.
1929
Colville family moves to Amherst, Nova Scotia
Colville’s father, David Colville takes position as superintendent at Robb Engineering Works in Amherst, NS. Colville’s mother, Florence, is apprenticed to a milliner. Shortly after their move to Amherst, Alex Colville contracts pneumonia and almost dies. The six-month long isolated recovery has a profound effect on him and it is during this time that Colville begins reading and drawing extensively.
1934
Art Lessons
For the next three years, Colville attends weekly art classes in Amherst instructed by Sarah Hart, a member of the Fine Arts faculty at Mount Allison University. Through these extension classes Stanley Royle, Head of the Fine Arts Department becomes aware of Colville’s artistic potential. Royle encourages Colville to continue his artistic studies at the university level.
Sarah Stewart Hart (1880–1981)
Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Sarah Hart studied woodcarving, clay modelling and drawing from the cast in New York City at The Cooper Union from 1902 to 1906 and achieved many awards for her work. In 1907, she began to teach part-time in the Art department at the Ladies’ College in Sackville. She taught wood carving until 1961 and in the 1930s she began teaching extension courses for the Art department in local communities such as Amherst, Nova Scotia.
1938
University
Colville meets Rhoda Wright
Colville and Rhoda Wright meet in the Fine Arts program at Mount Allison University. Their first year class was composed of just ten students; two of whom were men.
1939
Stanley Royle's Summer Art Program
Stanley Royle
Colville House, on the campus of Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, was the home of renowned Canadian artist Alex Colville, his wife Rhoda and their four children from 1949 to 1973.
Maintaining a studio in the attic of the house, it was during these years that the artist produced many of his most important works, including Horse and Train and Nude and Dummy.
Maintaining a studio in the attic of the house, it was during these years that the artist produced many of his most important works, including Horse and Train and Nude and Dummy.
Colville House, on the campus of Mount Allison University in
Sackville, New Brunswick, was the home of renowned Canadian artist Alex
Colville, his wife Rhoda and their four children from 1949 to 1973.
Maintaining a studio in the attic of the house, it was during these years that the artist produced many of his most important works, including Horse and Train and Nude and Dummy.
Maintaining a studio in the attic of the house, it was during these years that the artist produced many of his most important works, including Horse and Train and Nude and Dummy.
--------------------------
COLVILLE: A look at his iconic work
Canadian painter Alex Colville speaks to reporters after an
announcement that he had won a Governor General’s Award in Visual and
Media Arts. (TIM KROCHAK / Staff / File)
Legendary artist Alex Colville died Tuesday at his home in Wolfville at the age of 92.
Here is a look at some of the amazing work that led one admirer to refer to Colville as Canada’s iconic painter laureate.
Pacific by Alex Colville
Skater by Alex Colville
The River Spree by Alex Colville
Kiss With Honda by Alex Colville
Horse And Train by Alex Colville
To Prince Edward Island by Alex Colville
Seven Crows by Alex Colville
Soldier and Girl at Station by Alex Colville
Living Room by Alex Colville
-----
Colville studied fine arts at the university, and later created some of his most significant works, including ``Nude and Dummy'' and ``Horse and Train'' in Sackville.
The 35 silkscreen prints were donated to the school's Owens Art Gallery in the spring by Colville himself in memory of his wife, Rhoda, who died in December 2012.
Mount Allison says they are the only silkscreen prints produced by the artist, making the gallery one of the only institutions to have a complete set of Colville prints in its collection.
The first print, ``After Swimming,'' was made in 1955 while the last, ``Willow,'' was made in 2002.
Friends and members of the Colville family are expected to attend an unveiling of the artwork at a reception planned for Nov. 2 at Mount Allison.
Family, friends and admirers of Colville paid their respects at the Manning Memorial Chapel at Acadia University in Wolfville, where he once served as chancellor.
A casket draped in the Canadian flag led a procession of mourners into the service, where longtime friend James Perkin recalled how Colville’s experiences as an official war artist during the Second World War occasionally haunted him decades later.
“A man of profound resilience, he never took an easy, optimistic view of human affairs, having seen the depth of cruelty to which humanity can sink,” Perkin told the packed chapel.
Perkin said while the pain of Colville’s death last week was particularly felt by his relatives, it was also shared to some degree by people from across Canada and around the world.
“He has left behind a grieving family, a saddened circle of friends, a town that has lost a beloved citizen. But what a legacy he has left,” Perkin said.
“Works of art that will last forever, paintings that reveal the tenderness of human love, the faithfulness of animals, the nobility of everyday work, all co-existing with the folly and destruction of wars and the uncertainty of life itself.”
Rev. Timothy McFarland, Acadia University’s chaplain, said Colville will be remembered for his honesty, passion and compassion.
“We remember a man who had an instinct for keen observation and a gift to communicate in his art and in his life that which he observed,” McFarland said.
“Let it be that we will feel our loss, but so too will we continue to be inspired to follow his example of adding, co-creating in this world and all of creation in ways that will leave it a little better than we found it.”
Colville died July 16 at his home in Wolfville from a heart condition. He was 92.
His work reached millions, extending well beyond Canada through art galleries, magazines, book covers, posters, television, coins and even the cover of Bruce Cockburn’s 1973 album “Night Vision.”
A renowned painter, sketch artist, muralist and engraver, Colville was known for capturing the simple, tranquil moments of everyday life on canvas.
He was born in Toronto on Aug. 24, 1920. He moved to Amherst, N.S., as a boy with his family and studied fine arts at Mount Allison University in nearby Sackville, N.B., where he later created some of his most significant works, including “Nude and Dummy” and “Horse and Train.”
It was also there that Colville met his wife and muse, Rhoda. The couple married in 1942 in Wolfville, a quaint university town in the Annapolis Valley that became their home.
When Rhoda died last December, it left a gaping hole in Colville’s life, Perkin said.
“Conversation began to lose its sparkle and soon, only his unfailing courtesies were left,” he said.
“You got the sense that Alex was marking time.”
Though Colville’s alma mater remained close to his heart, his ties to Acadia University also ran deep.
The university awarded Colville an honorary degree in 1975 and named him chancellor six years later. Colville held the post until 1991 and later served as an honorary member of Acadia’s board of governors.
Colville is survived by daughter Ann and his two sons, Graham and Charles.
-----------
------------------
Here is a look at some of the amazing work that led one admirer to refer to Colville as Canada’s iconic painter laureate.
Pacific by Alex ColvilleSkater by Alex Colville
The River Spree by Alex Colville
Kiss With Honda by Alex Colville
Horse And Train by Alex Colville
To Prince Edward Island by Alex Colville
Seven Crows by Alex Colville
Soldier and Girl at Station by Alex Colville
Living Room by Alex Colville-----
Kentville Advertiser
Published
on July 26, 2013
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on July 24, 2013
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on July 22, 2013
Section:
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Type:
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--
Colville's alma mater to unveil major artwork donation
Alex Colville's Horse and Train is among the works he
created in Sackville, N.B., where he had attended Mount Allison University.
SACKVILLE, N.B. — New Brunswick's Mount Allison University says it will
unveil a major donation of artwork next month by Alex Colville, the iconic
Canadian artist who died in July.Colville studied fine arts at the university, and later created some of his most significant works, including ``Nude and Dummy'' and ``Horse and Train'' in Sackville.
The 35 silkscreen prints were donated to the school's Owens Art Gallery in the spring by Colville himself in memory of his wife, Rhoda, who died in December 2012.
Mount Allison says they are the only silkscreen prints produced by the artist, making the gallery one of the only institutions to have a complete set of Colville prints in its collection.
The first print, ``After Swimming,'' was made in 1955 while the last, ``Willow,'' was made in 2002.
Friends and members of the Colville family are expected to attend an unveiling of the artwork at a reception planned for Nov. 2 at Mount Allison.
----------------------
Wolfville neighbours angered by Colville House ads
Published on June 15, 2013
Published on June 15, 2013
Wolfville residents have expressed concern about the intentions of the new
owner to turn a heritage property once owned by Canadian painter Alex Colville
into student suites.
Wendy Elliott
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Alex Colville had a gift to communicate human love and folly, funeral hears
The Canadian Press
July 24, 2013
WOLFVILLE, N.S. – Alex Colville was remembered for his unflinching
artwork that reflected both the tenderness of love and ravage of war at a
memorial service Wednesday in Nova Scotia.Family, friends and admirers of Colville paid their respects at the Manning Memorial Chapel at Acadia University in Wolfville, where he once served as chancellor.
A casket draped in the Canadian flag led a procession of mourners into the service, where longtime friend James Perkin recalled how Colville’s experiences as an official war artist during the Second World War occasionally haunted him decades later.
“A man of profound resilience, he never took an easy, optimistic view of human affairs, having seen the depth of cruelty to which humanity can sink,” Perkin told the packed chapel.
Perkin said while the pain of Colville’s death last week was particularly felt by his relatives, it was also shared to some degree by people from across Canada and around the world.
“He has left behind a grieving family, a saddened circle of friends, a town that has lost a beloved citizen. But what a legacy he has left,” Perkin said.
“Works of art that will last forever, paintings that reveal the tenderness of human love, the faithfulness of animals, the nobility of everyday work, all co-existing with the folly and destruction of wars and the uncertainty of life itself.”
Rev. Timothy McFarland, Acadia University’s chaplain, said Colville will be remembered for his honesty, passion and compassion.
“We remember a man who had an instinct for keen observation and a gift to communicate in his art and in his life that which he observed,” McFarland said.
“Let it be that we will feel our loss, but so too will we continue to be inspired to follow his example of adding, co-creating in this world and all of creation in ways that will leave it a little better than we found it.”
Colville died July 16 at his home in Wolfville from a heart condition. He was 92.
His work reached millions, extending well beyond Canada through art galleries, magazines, book covers, posters, television, coins and even the cover of Bruce Cockburn’s 1973 album “Night Vision.”
A renowned painter, sketch artist, muralist and engraver, Colville was known for capturing the simple, tranquil moments of everyday life on canvas.
He was born in Toronto on Aug. 24, 1920. He moved to Amherst, N.S., as a boy with his family and studied fine arts at Mount Allison University in nearby Sackville, N.B., where he later created some of his most significant works, including “Nude and Dummy” and “Horse and Train.”
It was also there that Colville met his wife and muse, Rhoda. The couple married in 1942 in Wolfville, a quaint university town in the Annapolis Valley that became their home.
When Rhoda died last December, it left a gaping hole in Colville’s life, Perkin said.
“Conversation began to lose its sparkle and soon, only his unfailing courtesies were left,” he said.
“You got the sense that Alex was marking time.”
Though Colville’s alma mater remained close to his heart, his ties to Acadia University also ran deep.
The university awarded Colville an honorary degree in 1975 and named him chancellor six years later. Colville held the post until 1991 and later served as an honorary member of Acadia’s board of governors.
Colville is survived by daughter Ann and his two sons, Graham and Charles.
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Alex Colville
retrospective to open
Major exhibition at AGO offers over 100 works of legendary painter, who
died in 2013
People overlook the art of Alex Colville during a media preview of the
largest exhibition of the late Canadian painter's work ever assembled, at The
Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto on Tuesday. (THE CANADIAN PRESS)
TORONTO —
Master painter Alex Colville is remembered for his ability to immortalize the
seemingly mundane moments of everyday life, often with tense and haunting
undertones.
The Art Gallery of
Ontario is honouring his vast body of work with an exhibition tagged as the
most comprehensive Colville retrospective to date.
The realist-style
painter died in July 2013 at age 92, leaving behind a sweeping artistic legacy
that includes famous paintings such as Horse and Train and Target Pistol and
Man.
The Toronto
exhibition, which touts more than 100 pieces contributed by museums and private
collections, includes some paintings that have never been shown publicly.
Canadian art
curator Andrew Hunter said though the show follows Colville’s death, the
exhibition is not a memorial.
“We really did want
to engage him as a significant artist whose work is still deeply relevant,”
Hunter said. “He was incredibly good at distilling into a single image, often
stripped down to the most basic elements, a powerful statement about what it
meant to be in the world at this time.”
The exhibition,
which opens Saturday, pairs Colville’s work with contemporary pieces from
popular culture, including films, music and even a comic book. The goal is to
offer viewers a chance to reflect on Colville’s career, while linking his work
to filmmakers such as Wes Anderson and writers including Nobel Prize winner
Alice Munro, Hunter said.
Colville was born
in Toronto in 1920 and moved to Amherst as a young boy. He went on to study
fine arts at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., before moving to
Wolfville, a university town in the Annapolis Valley, where he lived until his
death.
His body of work
spanned decades, with varied sources of inspiration — from his Maritime roots
to his experiences as an official war artist in the Second World War, a role
that included depictions of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
in northern Germany.
He was made a Companion
of the Order of Canada in 1982 and won a Governor General’s Visual and Media
Arts Award in 2003.
Hunter said one of
the remarkable aspects of Colville’s work was his ability to paint in an
“in-between space.” “Colville’s work exists in a no man’s land, but it’s also
familiar,” he said, adding that this allows for both a sense of individual
attachment and universal appeal.
Film critic Jesse
Wente said the exhibition offers a new window into the work of an artist who
has been “omnipresent” in Canadian culture.
“As much as it is a
show about a Canadian painter, the connections to movies are really
intriguing,” he said, adding that Colville’s work is comparable to individual
frames of a movie, capturing one moment in a longer narrative.
Many artists have been
directly influenced by Colville’s work, including filmmaker Stanley Kubrick,
who incorporated four paintings into his classic horror movie “The Shining,” he
said.
Wente noted that
Colville’s paintings often convey a sense of “unease or discomfort,” but his
work is also “distinctly Canadian somehow.”
The exhibition
coincides with the release of a new book dubbed “Colville,” which includes
reproductions of 100 of his paintings.
Tim Hecker, an
electronic composer based in Montreal, was one of the contemporary artists to
contribute to the exhibition. He described Colville’s work as pictorial realism
and called the artist an “outlier” in an era when many artists were obsessed
with pop art.
Hecker created an
aural echo of Colville’s work, using overhead pendulum speakers in a “sonic
mood room,” which visitors must pass through during the exhibition.
It acts as a
“respite during the journey of all these images,” he said. “I just want it to
be something that’s experiential and speaks for itself.”
Colville’s daughter
Ann Kitz, who was involved with creating the exhibition, said she finds the new
approach to her father’s work “refreshing.” “His paintings will endure and they
will always speak for themselves,” she said.
The Alex Colville
exhibition runs at the Art Gallery of Ontario until Jan. 4. Afterward the show
will travel to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa
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Alex Colville
| Dates | August 23 2014-January 4 2015 |
| City | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Location | Art Gallery of Ontario |
| Website | http://www.ago.net/alex-colville |
| Main Body | More than 100 works by Canadian icon Alex Colville (1920-2013) will be presented at the AGO, marking the largest exhibition of the late artist’s work to date. Curated by Andrew Hunter, the AGO’s curator of Canadian art, the exhibition will honour Colville’s legacy and explore the continuing impact of his work from the perspectives of several prominent popular culture figures from film, literature and music. Known for painting decidedly personal subject matter, Colville’s painstakingly precise images depict an elusive tension, capturing moments perpetually on the edge of change and the unknown, often imbued with a deep sense of danger. Featuring works assembled from museums and private collections nationwide, many of which have never been shown publicly, the exhibition spans Colville’s entire career. |
| Additional Info | Born in Toronto in 1920, Colville was a painter, printmaker and veteran who drew his inspiration from the world around him, transforming the seemingly mundane figures and events of everyday life into archetypes of the modern condition. He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982 and won a Governor General's Visual and Media Arts Award in 2003. |
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