1. 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.
25 Facts About Alex Colville
1. 2.
Alex Colville moved with his family at age seven to St Catharines, and then to Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1929.
3.
Alex Colville attended Mount Allison University from 1938 to 1942, where he studied under Canadian Post-Impressionists like Stanley Royle and Sarah Hart, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
4.
Alex Colville enlisted in the infantry, eventually earning the rank of lieutenant.
5.
Alex Colville painted in Yorkshire and took part in the Royal Canadian Navy's landings in southern France.
6.
Alex Colville was then attached to the 3rd Canadian Division.
7.
Alex Colville's unit relieved the 82nd Airborne Division at Nijmegen, Netherlands, in mid-September 1944 during Operation Market Garden and remained there until the following February.
8.
Alex Colville continued on to tours in the Netherlands and Germany, where he was tasked with depicting the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
9.
Alex Colville's painting Bodies in a Grave, 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.
10.
Alex Colville had some success while still enrolled at Mount Allison, exhibiting at the Art Association of Montreal in 1941, and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1942.
11.
Alex 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.
12.
Alex Colville influenced a host of students that pursued a realist painting style.
13.
Alex Colville 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 named Colville House.
14.
Alex Colville often used his immediate surroundings as subject matter, using his family as models.
15.
In 1967, Alex Colville was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, elevated to Companion in 1982, the order's highest level.
16.
Alex Colville lived in St Catharines, Ontario, for three years before moving to Nova Scotia.
17.
In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Alex Colville aligned himself with the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and was a card-carrying party member for many years.
18.
Alex Colville died on July 16,2013 at his house in Wolfville at the age of 92, after suffering from a heart condition.
19.
Alex Colville exhibited extensively across Canada and internationally including at the Tate Gallery in London and the Beijing Exhibition Centre in Beijing.
20.
In 2003, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia organized an exhibition titled Alex Colville: Return curated by Tom Smart.
21.
Alex Colville's work is found in many collections including the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University.
22.
Alex Colville believed it conveyed his perception of war, as both heroism and enduring persistence among nature's elements and constant danger.
23.
Alex Colville describes this work as an exploration of "the searching vision of the female" contrasted with the "stupid and passive" man, who she occludes.
24.
Alex Colville's 1967 painting Pacific, showing a man leaning against an open door looking out to sea while a Browning Hi-Power pistol rests on a table in the foreground, inspired one of the definitive scenes in the 1995 film Heat with actor Robert De Niro.
25.
Several of Alex Colville's paintings appear in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining, including Woman and Terrier, Horse and Train, Hound in Field, Dog, Boy, and St John River, and Moon and Cow.