Alex Colville, 92, R.I.P.

Back in high school, I worked for two years at a library, and among the large, hefty art books we carried were a few showcasing the work of Alex Colville, whose art frankly looked like no one else’s.

There’s a clean, lean, beauty to his art. Soft colours, fine details of strange human banality, and a fixation on dogs, guns, boats, houses, and nudity. For myself, the faces + guns stood out because they seemed to be on the same visual plain:  silent, clean in their lines, but their stillness made the relationship between the two unsettling, as though a sleek revolver was on par with a beer, a lawn rake, or an empty glass.

Colville passed away today at 92, and way back in 1983, the CBC’s Barbara Frum interviewed the artist during a retrospective:

 

 

Colville also offered a short series of comments of his best-known work back in 1967 for the CBC:

 

R.I.P.

 

 

 

Mark R. Hasan, Editor
Big Head Amusements

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