Gone but still revered, Alex Colville created paintings of contemplation and reflection

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Solidly at home in the Maritimes, Alex Colville lived deliberately cut off from city intellectuals

Horse and Train by Alex Colville, hangs in the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ont., a gift of Dominion Foundries and Steel Ltd., 1957.Aug. 24 marks the centenary of Alex Colville, OC, the great modern realist painter who died in 2013. Although his artwork portrayed a world of muted colours and stark scenes, the man himself, as I came to discover, was warm and responsive, though cloaked in an austere public image.

Colville was born in Toronto on Aug. 24, 1920. His work combines the Flemish detail of Andrew Wyeth, the eerie foreboding of George Tooker and the anguished confrontations of Lucian Freud. In contrast to Jackson Pollock’s splashing action pictures, Colville created paintings of contemplation and reflection that emphasized their intellectual content. His work had the fine draftsmanship and purity of line that runs from van Eyck through Duerer and Holbein to Ingres.

Extremely cultured and well read, Alex could intelligently discuss any subject that came up, and we were drawn together by comparable interests in art and literature. “I am pleased to see once again how similar our tastes are,” Alex observed, “even to the extent of preferring a particular work by a favourite author.” Attracted to works that portray loss and pain, danger and death, Alex avidly read masculine writers from Joseph Conrad to George Orwell.

 

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