Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary
Alex Colville’s paintings often examined arrivals and departures
A painting by Alex Colville, one of Canada’s best-known artists, sold at auction last month for a recordbreaking $1.88 million. “Harbour” (1975) features a man in a Land Rover with a dog. The moment is ordinary, and yet not so ordinary.
A similarly ordinary and extraordinary moment involving a driver and a car — minus the dog — meets us in “Traveller,” one of the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s recent acquisitions. Executed in 1992, it is on show as part of Art for a Century: 100 for the 100th.
Colville (1920-2013) was born in Toronto, but lived in Nova Scotia for most of his life. At a time when most Canadian artists tackled landscape or abstraction, Colville specialized in the human figure painted in a lifelike style.
Colville’s paintings often include roads, railway tracks and waterways and the kind of transport people use on them, such as cars, trains, boats and horses.
In “Traveller” we see the world from inside a car. The composition is clear and sparse, the palette dominated by black, white and grey, with touches of red and yellow.
Only part of the interior of the vehicle dominates the foreground. A cropped pair of hands hold the steering wheel. They might belong to the artist, because he likes to put himself in the picture. We can see part of the driver’s head in the rear-view mirror, and he has short grey hair, like Colville.
The dashboard instruments indicate the car, which appears to be a Porsche 911, is travelling 66 km/h. It has done more than 15,800 kilometres. The gas tank is full.
Colville likes to focus on people leaving and arriving. Perhaps this driver is embarking on a journey.
Through the car’s windshield we see a spacious, familiar Canadian landscape. Part of a grey river cuts through the whiteness of the snow. The road ahead is packed with snow. The driver, hands on the wheel, precise instruments to hand, is in control. Or is he?
A sports car like a Porsche can be hard to handle in slippery conditions.
A bridge awaits. Bridges, for Colville, are boundaries between order and chaos, life and death.
The road travelled appears to be empty, based on its reflection in the two mirrors. The inside mirror partly hides a person standing at the side of the road. Has this figure suddenly appeared out of nowhere?
He, or she, wears a dark coat, furry hat and mittens. The arms are raised, the face turned away from the car to something in the distance. Has this person seen the car? Has the driver seen him? And what happens next? “I think of things as beginning rather than ending,” Colville once said.
He offers a similar layout in “Arrival,” painted a year earlier. The foreground is filled by part of a sailboat. A man’s hand holds the tiller as the boat approaches the wharf.
The moment, however, seems less foreboding than in “Traveller.” For one thing, the scene is set in the summer. The sailor’s journey is over. A woman in a white dress appears to be waiting for him.
But this, too, might not be as sunny as it seems.
“I think of animals as being incapable of evil, and I certainly don’t think this about people,” Colville said.
Speaking of animals, Colville’s famous “Horse and Train” has returned to the AGH and is hanging near “Traveller.”
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com