Alex Colville
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
David Alexander Colville, PC, CC, ONS (born August 24, 1920 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian painter.
He studied Fine Arts at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick from 1938 to 1942.
Colville exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally including the Tate Gallery in London, England and the Beijing Exhibition Centre in Beijing. In 1983 an international touring retrospective of his work was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Alex Colville's work is found in many collections including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia[1], 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 Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany.
[edit] Trivia
- His painting "Horse and Train" (1954), was inspired by two lines from the poet Roy Campbell:
- Against a regiment I oppose a brain
- And a dark horse against an armored train.
- "Horse and Train" appears on the cover of the album Night Vision by Bruce Cockburn.
- Alex Colville and his painting "Horse and Train" are mentioned in the introduction (and in the story itself) of Nova Scotia fiction writer Barry Wood's short story Nowhere to Go published in England's Postscripts #14 in 2008.
- His mural at Mount Allison University, known officially as "The History of Mount Allison" or "The Circuit Rider," features a centrepiece of a very large rear end of a horse. This "horse's ass painting," as it is often known, is viewed by some as brilliant and by some as appalling. Colville chose not to explain the significance of the work.
- 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.
- "Pacific" inspired a scene in the film Heat with actor Robert De Niro.
[edit] External links
