Alex Colville

I knew he was a local artist with an international reputation, but did not realize until recently that much of his work is set in Nova Scotia. He spent the last 40 years of his life in Wolfville, where he and his wife lived in the house she had grown up in and which her father had built.

In looking at his work, I am reminded of Hemingway’s theory of omission, that leaving elements out of a story strengthens it. Colville does something similar in his paintings.  In many of them faces are obscured or hidden in a variety of ways. People have their backs to the viewer, their heads are turned away or are beyond the frame of the painting.  The result is that the context is incomplete, and we are left to fill in key details ourselves. Often there is a sense of impending danger.

The unsettling combination of beauty and dark possibility is evident in Horse and Train, To Prince Edward Island, Couple on Beach, and Berlin Bus.

In the National Gallery of Canada's website, Colville is quoted as saying, “I see life as inherently dangerous. I have an essentially dark view of the world and human affairs.”  

This view was doubtless a result of the time he spent in Europe as a war artist.  Additionally both he and his wife had traumatic experiences as children.  He was nine when his family moved to Nova Scotia, shortly after which he contracted pneumonia and nearly died.  His wife was around the same age when her father, sister and  brother were killed when their car was struck by a train at a level crossing just outside of Windsor NS.

Magic Realism

“...after the war he realized that his purpose as a painter was to translate archetypal myths into a contemporary visual style…  he abhorred abstract expressionism’s subjectivity and seeming undisciplined mode of representation” (Smart, p35)

Two famous American painters also associated with Magic Realism are Garth Wood (American Gothic) and Andrew Wyeth (Christina's World).

Blomidon

Another aspect of Colville's work that appeals to me is unrelated to Magic Realism. This is because the settings for much of his work are close to where I live, in the upper portion of the Annapolis Valley.  Colville had a cottage on the edge of Minas Basin, which provided the backdrop for many paintings, often with Cape Blomidon visible in the distance.

Blomidon is "a never-ending delight" wrote Esther Clark Wright on the very first page of her memoir, Blomidon Rose.

If we are coming over the hills from Halifax, "There's Blomidon!" we shout triumphantly, as soon as we catch sight of it, and we berate the roadmakers who chose a route that dips so soon behind hills and deprives us of a longer look at the beloved landmark. Outsiders are puzzled, and a little exasperated, by our enthusiasms for Blomidon.  They have seen higher mountains...

Blomidon is visible in the distance in Surveyor and Family and Rainstorm, as well in many other paintings. In West Brooklyn Road a man is waving from an overpass on Highway 101 just before it descends into the Valley and the view that Esther Clark Wright so cherished. Perhaps for Colville the serene rural environment was a suitable setting for juxtaposing the uncertainty of life.

In French Cross, a female rider passes a rigid iron monument, a memorial to the ethnic cleansing that took place in the 18th century when the British so cruelly displaced the Acadians who dwelt in the area.  The monument overlooks Minas Basin where Acadians were loaded onto ships like cattle.  In looking back over her shoulder, the rider is also looking back into history.

Sources

Alex Colville: Return by Tom Smart, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia/Douglas & McIntyre, 2003, 144 pages 

Ordinary Magic: A Biographical Sketch of Alex Coleville by J.R.C. Perkin, Robert Pope Foundation/Lancelot Press, 1995, 190 pages

Colville by David Burnett, Art Gallery of Ontario/McClelland and Stewart, 1983, 272 pages. In the book by Burnett there's a useful map showing the location of many of Colville's paintings in the upper Annapolis Valley.