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.<\/p>\n
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: \u00a0silent, 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.<\/p>\n
Colville passed away today at 92, and way back in 1983, the CBC’s Barbara Frum interviewed the artist during a retrospective:<\/p>\n
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