Alex Colville, age eleven, near Tidnish, Nova Scotia, where his family had a summer cottage.
Gallery of Alex Colville
1938
Alex Colville, age eighteen, with his parents, David and Florence.
Gallery of Alex Colville
62 York St, Sackville, NB E4L 1E2, Canada
Mount Allison University.
Career
Gallery of Alex Colville
1156 High St, Santa Cruz, California 95064, United States
University of California, Santa Cruz.
Gallery of Alex Colville
1945
Lieutenant D. Alex Colville, War Artist, Third Canadian Infantry Division, Germany, March 4, 1945, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, photograph by Lieutenant Barney J. Gloster.
Gallery of Alex Colville
1951
A Colville family portrait. From left to right, John, Graham, Alex, Rhoda, Ann, and Charles.
Gallery of Alex Colville
1986
Alex Colville, C.C. (Companion, Order of Canada), photograph by Harry Palmer.
Gallery of Alex Colville
15 University Ave, Wolfville, NS B4P 2R6, Canada
Acadia University.
Gallery of Alex Colville
Alex and Rhoda Colville on their wedding day, 1942. The couple is pictured in front of Rhoda’s family home in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where they lived from 1973 until 1998.
Gallery of Alex Colville
First-year portrait class taught by Stanley Royle. Alex Colville stands at easel, far right. Mount Allison University Archives, Sackville.
Lieutenant D. Alex Colville, War Artist, Third Canadian Infantry Division, Germany, March 4, 1945, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, photograph by Lieutenant Barney J. Gloster.
Alex and Rhoda Colville on their wedding day, 1942. The couple is pictured in front of Rhoda’s family home in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where they lived from 1973 until 1998.
Alex Colville was a Canadian painter. He depicted the everyday life of small communities in the Atlantic Provinces of Canada. Although Colville worked during the heyday of the abstract art movement, he was devoted to figurative style.
Background
Ethnicity:
Alex Colville's father was from Scotland, while his mother from Canada.
Colville was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, August 24, 1920. He was the second son of David Colville and Florence Gault. His father was from a small Scottish mining town and moved to Canada in the year 1910. David Colville specialized in steelwork, building bridges and other engineering projects. In 1914 he married Alex Colville's mother, Florence. She was from Trenton, Ontario. David Colville kept moving extensively from place to place during the first years of their marriage. He resided in Moncton, New Brunswick; Cape Breton, Nova Scotia; and Trenton. In 1920 the family went to Toronto. Alex Colville had an elder brother, Robert.
Education
When he was seven, Alex Colville went with his family to St. Catharines, and then to Amherst, Nova Scotia in 1929. Between 1938 and 1942 he studied at Mount Allison University, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
In 1942 Colville joined the Canadian Army, serving from 1944 to 1945 in Europe as an official war artist. He painted in Yorkshire and took part in the Royal Canadian Navy's landings in southern France. Colville's unit relieved the 82nd Airborne Division at Nijmegen, Netherlands in 1944 and remained in the Netherlands until the following February. Alex Colville continued to travel throughout the Netherlands and Germany. There he was also tasked to paint the atrocities of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
When the war was over, he started to teach at Mount Allison University in 1946, resigning in 1963 to focus totally on painting. He worked from a studio in his home on York Street; this building is now known as Colville House. In 1951 his first solo exhibition was organized at the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John. Alex Colville first captured the public attention in the 1950s with his series presented during the gallery shows in New York City and later exhibited in Europe before they gained recognition in Canada.
The subjects of his early paintings were inspired by his home life. Renowned for his time-consuming methods, he created firstly numerous sketches before starting to paint. He used this method to create his best-known painting, Horse and Train (1954). In 1965 Alex Colville was commissioned to design the Canadian 1867-1967 centennial commemorative coin set. It consisted 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.
He worked as a visiting professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz in 1967. In 1966 Colville's artworks along with those of Yves Gaucher and Sorel Etrog were used to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale. Alex Colville lived for three years in St. Catharines, Ontario, before eventually moving to Nova Scotia. In the year 1973, the artist moved with his family to his wife's hometown, Wolfville. There they lived and worked in the house that her father built. In 1981 Alex Colville received the post of the university chancellor of Acadia University serving until 1991. In 1983 the Art Gallery of Ontario organized an international touring retrospective of Colville's paintings.
Alex Colville was a particularly important contributor to the modern art of the 1950s and 60s, and one of the greatest 20th-century painters from Canada. He earned an international reputation for penetrating works that were often described as "magic realism".
Colville received numerous awards and honors for his achievements, including being named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1967, Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982, the order's highest level, and receiving the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2003. In 1975 the artist was awarded Molson Prize (Canada Council). Colville was appointed to the Privy Council in the year 1992. In 2003 he was named a member the Order of Nova Scotia.
In 2010, Colville's painting, Man on Verandah (1953), was sold by Heffel Fine Art Auction House at their auction of Canadian post-war and contemporary art for $1.287 million, a record for any painting or sculpture sold by a living Canadian artist.
For many years Colville was a supporter of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and acted as a card-carrying party member.
Views
Quotations:
"Anxiety is the normality of our age."
"The universality of art, I suppose, always springs from the particular."
"I think if anything I am perhaps more inclined than most people are to be polite and considerate because I am aware that human relationships are innately fragile and kind of dangerous."
"It's the ordinary things that seem important to me."
"I don't intend to be menacing, but I do think of life as being essentially dangerous. We never know what's going to happen from one day to the next."
"My painting occurs when I think of two disparate elements."
"I don't use photographs because photographs don't give me the kind of information I need."
"The woman sees, I suppose, and the man does not."
"I don't think there's such a thing as an evil animal."
Connections
Alex Colville married Rhoda Wright in 1942. The couple had three sons, Graham Alexander, John Harrower and Charles Wright, and a daughter, Ann Christian.
