David Alexander Colville (August 24, 1920 – July 16, 2013) was a Canadian painter and printmaker.
David Alexander Colville was born on August 24, 1920 in Toronto, Ontario, the second son of Scottish immigrant David Harrower Colville and his wife Florence Gault. He moved with his family at age seven to St. Catharines, and then to Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1929. He attended Mount Allison University from 1938 to 1942, where he studied with Canadian Post-Impressionists like Stanley Royle and Sarah Hart, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Colville married Rhoda Wright, who he had been friends with since his first year at "Mount A", in 1942 and enlisted in the Canadian Army shortly afterwards. He enlisted in the infantry, eventually earning the rank of lieutenant. He painted in Yorkshire and took part in the Royal Canadian Navy's landings in southern France. He was then attached to the 3rd Canadian Division. After being in the army for two years, and because he was a fine-arts student, he was made an Official Second World War artist in May 1944. His unit relieved the 82nd Airborne Division at Nijmegen, Netherlands, in mid-September 1944 during Operation Market Garden and remained there until the following February. He continued on to tours in the Netherlands and Germany, where he was also tasked with depicting the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Colville's painting Bodies in a Grave (1946), a scene of emaciated corpses in a Bergen-Belsen burial pit, is based on images he captured with his army-issue camera at the concentration camp.
Colville had some success while still enrolled at Mount Allison, exhibiting at the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) in 1941, and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1942. After the war, Colville returned to New Brunswick and became a faculty member with the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University, where he taught from 1946 to 1963. Colville is often cited as belonging to the Magic Realism movement, and within this he developed his own style that influenced both a regional and national art community, as teacher and founder of what would become known as Maritime Realism. By contrast to other members of the Maritime school, the composition of his work involved geometry. Often too, in his later work, he seized on the fugitive moment, imagining a hypothetical "What if" something happened in the conscious world.
Maritime Realism came to fruition during the apex of abstract painting's ascendancy both nationally and internationally. Colville influenced a host of students that pursued a realist painting style. Norman Eastman (class of 1952), Hugh Mackenzie (class of 1953), Tom Forrestall (class of 1958), Christopher Pratt (class of 1961) Mary Pratt (class of 1961), Daniel Brown (class of 1961), Nancy Stevens (class of 1962), Ken Tomlie (class of 1962), Roger Savage (class of 1963), Suzanne Hill (class of 1964), Glenn Adams (class of 1965), and Don Pentz (class of 1966).
He left teaching to devote himself to painting and print-making full-time from a studio in his home in Sackville on York Street; this building is now named Colville House. The house was donated to Mount Allison by the Colville family. It now serves as a museum and gallery dedicated to Alex Colville's life and work under the auspice of the Owens Art Gallery.
Colville often used his immediate surroundings as subject matter, using his family as models. Throughout his career, his wife Rhoda Colville, who was also an artist and poet, served as a model for a number of his celebrated works. Rhoda Colville's recreational life as a swimmer, skater, dancer, singer, pianist and cyclist was featured in her husband's pieces, often set in the landscapes and waterways of Annapolis Valley.
In 1966, works by Colville along with those of Yves Gaucher and Sorel Etrog represented Canada at the Venice Biennale. In 1967, Colville was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, elevated to Companion in 1982, the order's highest level. In 1973, the University of Windsor gave him an honorary doctor of laws.
Colville lived in St. Catharines, Ontario, for three years before moving to Nova Scotia. In 1973, he moved his family to his wife's hometown of Wolfville, where they lived and worked in the house that her father built and in which she was born.
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. In 1981 he was appointed chancellor of Nova Scotia's Acadia University serving in that role until 1991. In 1997, he received an honorary degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Colville and his wife, Rhoda Wright, had one daughter and three sons, one of whom predeceased them in 2012. They additionally had eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Wright died on December 29, 2012, after succumbing to dementia.
Colville died on July 16, 2013 at his house in Wolfville at the age of 92, after suffering from a heart condition. His funeral was held on July 24 at Acadia University's Manning Memorial Chapel.
Colville exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally including at the Tate Gallery in London and the Beijing Exhibition Centre in Beijing. In 1983, an international touring retrospective of his work was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). In 2003, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia organized an exhibition titled Alex Colville: Return curated by Tom Smart. Upon his death in 2013, the AGO was in the process of mounting Alex Colville, the largest exhibition of the artist's work to date which opened in 2014.
Alex Colville's work is found in many collections including the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University. The Owens also maintains Colville House, the private home of Colville which acts as an exhibit space for his work. Colville's work can also be found in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Cape Breton University Art Gallery in Sydney, Nova Scotia, the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne and the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover, Germany.
Infantry, near Nijmegen, Holland
Trained as an infantry officer, he did a painting when World War II ended. Based upon numerous drawings, it was called Infantry and is now in the Canadian War Museum. It represents a platoon of Canadian soldiers spread out and marching along both sides of a road. Colville believed it conveyed his perception of war, as both heroism and enduring persistence among nature's elements and constant danger. The face of the first man is actually a portrait of the artist's father.
This 1954 work was inspired by two lines from the poet Roy Campbell:
Against a regiment I oppose a brain