‘OUR PAINTER LAUREATE’
Celebrated Canadian artist Alex Colville dead at 92
WOLFVILLE, N.S. Celebrated painter Alex Colville, whose meticulously crafted scenes of everyday life established him as one of Canada’s most well-known modern artists, has died at the age of 92.
His son, Graham, said his father passed away Tuesday at his home in Wolfville, N.S.
A painter, engraver, sketch artist and muralist, Colville earned a reputation for crafting tranquil compositions that focused on routine moments of family life and featured landscapes, animals and the sea.
Colville’s nephew, Alexander Colville, said Colville was in “relatively good mental shape” until the death of his wife Rhoda last December.
“The family really didn’t expect that Alex would last that much longer after his wife passed, because they were sort of your fairy-tale couple,” said Alexander, who lives in Northport, N.S.
“He lived life on his own terms and did things the way he wanted to do them and was never really there to impress anybody.
“People joked about him getting his fancy sports cars and stuff like that, but he never did that to impress someone, it was because he felt like driving a car like that, and that’s the way he was.
“He just enjoyed life, and I guess if we could just have enjoyed life as well as he did we would all be pretty happy.”
Colville’s work was accessible, memorable and reached millions of Canadians through myriad avenues including art galleries, magazines, book covers, postcards, posters, television, coins and even via the cover of a Bruce Cockburn record album.
With his focus on the ordinary, some have been tempted to crown the Maritimer as Canada’s Norman Rockwell. Robert Fulford has simply described Colville as “our painter laureate” and “a great national icon-maker.”
Colville began his career as a military artist and famously documented troops landing at Juno Beach on D-Day, becoming the most prominent painter to document Canada’s involvement in the Second World War.
After the war, Colville forged a unique hyper-realist style that eschewed fashionable trends toward abstract and expressionist art.
“No other modern painter is so unconscious of prevailing fashion and so indifferent to what’s new in the art world,” literary critic John Bayley said of Colville in his book Elegy for Iris.
Colville’s images managed to elicit feelings of both contemplation and angst through the pairing of incongruous elements such as a languid nude with a gun or a blond toddler next to a large black dog with prominent claws.
Even his most serene compositions were infused with a sense of unease.
Colville was born Aug. 24, 1920, in Toronto. He moved to Amherst, N.S., as a boy with his family and studied fine arts at Mount Allison University. He graduated in 1942 and married that same year in Wolfville, N.S.
After that, Colville served in the Canadian Army from 1942 to 1946, working as a military artist from 1944 to 1946. He then taught painting and art history at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B., where the couple raised three sons and a daughter.
From the early 1950s, Colville became closely associated with the American “regionalist” school of painting exemplified by Andrew Wyeth, as well as the American Precisionists of the 1930s.
The National Gallery of Canada began collecting his work in the 1950s, but it was not until he gained exhibitions in Hannover, Germany and London in 1969 and 1970 that commercial success would build.
Colville left the university in 1963 to devote himself to painting, but would return to teaching a few years later for stints that included visiting professor at University of California in 1967 and visiting artist in Berlin in 1971.
He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1967, and made Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982. He won a Governor General’s Visual and Media Arts Award in 2003.
He also served on several provincial and national boards, including the Canada Council and the National Gallery of Canada, and was chancellor of Nova Scotia’s Acadia University from 1981 to 1991.
Colville was predeceased by his wife Rhoda and their middle son, John. In addition to Graham, Colville is survived by a second son, Charles, and a daughter, Ann.