Atlantic Canada’s venerable realist created a signature sense of place
Alex Colville led a quiet life after painting atrocities as a war artist in the 1940s. He taught for 17 years at Mount Allison University near the Tantramar Marshes in Sackville, NB, before moving to Wolfville, NS, his wife Rhoda’s hometown. He painted the seemingly mundane details of everyday life—a woman looking through binoculars out at the Northumberland Strait, a couple getting a snack from the refrigerator, a black horse running past a stark white church.
But Colville, with his signature semi-detached style, was able to make the mundane profound, the world familiar and ominous all at once. Like Douglas Lochhead’s poems in High Marsh Road, Colville created a distinct sense of place while also skewing it. You may have been to Tantramar hundreds of times, but still, looking at his 1954 painting, Horse and Train, you wonder: where is this place?
As Andrew Hunter argues in a recently published coffee-table book titled, Colville (released by Goose Lane Editions in August to coincide with the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Colville retrospective), the painter created “universals in the detailed specifics of place.”
“Colville now feels like a place to me,” writes Hunter, the book’s editor and curator of Canadian art at the AGO. “Not a specific place you go to, but an ambient, transient space that one encounters, that envelops you.”
Colville-the-book is filled with Colville-the-artist’s most famous paintings: To Prince Edward Island (1965), Soldier and Girl at Station (1953) and Seven Crows (1980). But it also includes a section, written by Hunter, on Colville’s life and works, and a Colville comic-strip history by David Collier at the back.
Hunter’s section, titled “Welcome to Colville,” is moving and educational (and punctuated by lyrics from Talking Heads’ song, “Once in a Lifetime”). Hunter highlights how Colville’s simple aesthetic inspired contemporary artists and filmmakers like Joel and Ethan Coen, Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson, who all share the painter’s off-kilter, realist bent. Colville’s unsettling 1992 painting, Traveler, could just as easily be a still from the Coen brothers’ 1996 film, Fargo, a bleak, snowbound black-comedy and crime thriller.
At one point in the book, Hunter describes what it’s like to get lost in a Colville painting, just waiting for something to happen: “You are frozen, caught in the moment, no past, no future, and still, only a present haunted by what feels like memories.”
That’s the Colville allure. He painted a world in which everything hangs on a moment, a place where we can step back and look at things from the outside, see the moment before everything changed. It’s a reality we almost wish for—one more full of mystery and meaning.