Alex Colville

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Hon. Alex Colville in 1945.

David Alexander Colville, PC, CC, ONS, BFA, LL.D (born August 24, 1920 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian painter.

Considering himself a Maritimer, Colville's family moved to Amherst, Nova Scotia in 1929. He attended Mount Allison University, graduating from the fine arts program in 1942. He married Rhoda Wright that year and then enlisted in the Canadian Army. During his four-year deployment to the European Theatre, he worked as one of Canada's most famous war artists under the War Artist Program - famously painting troops landing at Juno Beach on D-Day. Colville returned to Nova Scotia after the war and taught art history and art at Mount Allison's fine arts department from 1946-1963. Colville left teaching to devote himself to painting and print-making full-time from a studio on the Mount Allison campus in a historic home on York Street (today a small student residence named Colville House). In 1973, he moved his family to his wife's hometown of Wolfville, Nova Scotia where they live in the house that her father had built and in which she was born. The Colville's have three sons and a daughter along with eight grandchildren.

His drawings and paintings often involve meticulous planning and have a strict geometric underpinning that is then carried from the test sketch to the real painting. Colville stated on numerous occasions that he was an artist of the real and despised other artists who did not carry their work beyond the geometry or other abstract ideas in the heart of their work, hence the controversy regarding the style of his paintings.

Colville calls himself a realist, while many critics and art lovers have chosen to see him as a magic realist. Indeed, his peculiar landscapes, settings and characters, though often desolate, often have an internal conflict, stemming from the ever-present, yet unseen, pattern of geometric design. The difficulty of categorizing his work is in itself a unique mark of his art and is possibly an implicit comment on issues of existentialism and alienation in the world from which Colville drew his ideas and images.

[edit] Honours

In 1967, Colville was commissioned by the Royal Canadian Mint to design the coins for Canada's centennial year.

In 1967, Colville was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, raised to Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982.

From 1981-1991 he served as Chancellor of Acadia University.

In 1992, Colville was named to the Queen's Privy Council for Canada in honour of his work. The appointment allows him to use the style The Honourable before his name with the postnomial letters P.C.

In 2002 Colville was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame

He has received 8 honorary degrees from universities across Canada.

[edit] Trivia

To Prince Edward Island

His painting "Horse and Train" (1954), was inspired by two lines from the poet Roy Campbell:

Against a regiment I oppose a brain

And a dark horse against an armored train.

"Horse and Train" appears on the cover of the album Night Vision by Bruce Cockburn.
His mural at Mount Allison University, known officially as "The History of Mount Allison" or "The Circuit Rider," features a centrepiece of a very large rear end of a horse. This "horse's ass painting," as it is often known, is viewed by some as brilliant and by some as appalling. Colville chose not to explain the significance of the work.
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.