Colville, Alex (1920-2013), was a leading Canadian painter of the 1900’s. Colville did not belong to a particular art movement, and he did not paint abstract works as so many artists of the 1900’s did. Instead, he painted in a distinctive style that achieved a haunting kind of precise realism .
Most of Colville’s works show a human figure carefully placed next to objects, animals, or other human beings, usually from his immediate environment. He selected such everyday settings as a river bank, the seaside, a circus, a sporting event, a boat, a highway, or a swimming pool. But these scenes are never just representations of everyday life. Colville’s images seem motionless, evoking themes of loneliness, isolation, parting, work, leisure, or love. Behind the realistic surface of his imagery, he captured a world that could be filled with joy or beauty or a sense of the disturbing or dangerous.
One of Colville’s best-known paintings, Horse and Train (1954), portrays a black horse galloping down a railway track away from the viewer toward an oncoming train. To Prince Edward Island (1965) shows a woman on a boat looking through binoculars toward the viewer. Pacific (1967) portrays a man leaning against an open door, looking out to sea while a pistol rests on a table in the foreground.
Colville took great care in creating his works, producing only three or four paintings or prints each year. He first prepared sketches and studies before making drawings from a live model. He then began the slow and painstaking process of applying layer after layer of thinned paint to a wooden panel. He finally sealed the surface with transparent lacquer.
David Alexander Colville was born on Aug. 24, 1920, in Toronto, Ontario. He moved with his family to Nova Scotia in 1929. Colville attended Mount Allison University in New Brunswick from 1938 to 1942, receiving a B.F.A. degree. Colville served in the Canadian army from 1942 to 1946, during and after World War II (1939-1945). He taught at Mount Allison University from 1946 to 1963, when he permanently devoted himself to painting and printmaking. In 1965, the Canadian government commissioned him to design coins commemorating Canada’s centennial year. Colville lived in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, from 1973 until his death on July 16, 2013.
