Art house
It wasn't until he turned handyman on his 1879 Sackville house that Alex Colville began to realize his artistic vision. He once said it was while measuring and drawing up detailed plans that he began to 'get this idea of figures in a specific environment rather than just a kind of vague nothingness.' Now the house that got him thinking in geometric terms is open to the public - and is full of his ideas. Story by Kate Wallace.
The house that launched Alex Colville's career is a trim white clapboard at 76 York St. in Sackville. Not simply where one of Canada's most important living artists made some of his most important works, the house was a catalyst in Colville's development, a critical element in his maturation into a realist painter of international acclaim.
The painter and his family lived in the house from 1948 to 1973, when he and his wife moved to Wolfville, where they live still. It was in their Sackville home, in a studio in the attic, that Colville created such seminal works as Nude and Dummy and Horse and Train.
But Colville's creative vision wasn't always as clear as his astoundingly successful career - one that is especially impressive considering it was launched from tiny Sackville - would suggest.
In the summer of 1949, after a couple of years of not painting much - and not entirely pleased with what he was painting - Colville put aside his pens and brushes to focus instead on renovating the 1879 house.
In 1982, Colville called the experience "absolutely crucial."
The business of measuring, drawing up detailed plans and the spatial organization that the home improvements entailed would change the course of his art practise. Those months spent as a handyman illuminated for Colville how to "get this idea of figures in a specific environment rather than just a kind of vague nothingness as in the previous compositions."
His 1950 canvas Nude and Dummy, with its sharp geometric substructure and tightly controlled relationship of form and space, illustrates this.
Colville, now 87, called it his first good work.
"I said, 'Now I sense that I'm kind of onto something' - what people in literature and poetry speak of as a poet finding their voice," Colville said in a 2003 interview with Maclean's magazine.
Today, Colville House is open to the public for the first time. After years of serving as a student residence and office space for Mount Allison, which has owned the building since 1981, Colville House is reborn as a place to celebrate the work and ideas of the town's most famed artist.
But, unlike some museum-like artists' homes in which nothing appears to have changed since the artist last entered it, Colville House is not a reconstruction, says Gemey Kelly, director of Mount Allison's Owens Art Gallery, a partner in the project.
"It isn't so much about going and seeing things as they would have been when the family was there. The idea is to be in a place that has meaning, but also because it is kind of a symbol of what ultimately became meaningful for the artist," she says.
"It's kind of an entry point into the world of Alex Colville."
Colville House welcomes visitors with high quality reproductions of the artist's works that have connections to Sackville, as well as with a couple of films about Colville and his art, including the 1983 National Film Board documentary The Splendour of Order. It will also serve as an education resource and outreach tool for the community, the university and the Owens. Kelly said it could be used for school programs, symposia and visiting curators.
And while the house "is kind of an envelope" to the artist's ideas of measurement and geometry, "measurement isn't just used by Colville as a way to construct paintings," Kelly says. "It's really a parable for thinking about order and the ways people construct their lives."
Colville was born in Toronto on Aug. 24, 1920, moving to Amherst, N.S. with his family when he was nine. A near-fatal bout with pneumonia that sent him to bed for months turned the young Colville inwards, to drawing and books. He lived in the border town until he finished high school, in 1938, when he crossed the marsh to nearby Sackville to study fine art at Mount Allison.
In the spring of 1942, the year he graduated, he enlisted in the Canadian army. Later that summer, he married Rhoda Wright, his wife to this day. He spent the next couple of years advancing through the ranks, living on bases in New Brunswick and Ontario. In 1944, he was sent to London, England, where he was advised he had been appointed an official war artist.
Charged with documenting the Second World War, Colville spent the next two years drawing and painting scenes of the drudgery and boredom endured by the soldiers, as well as some of the war's most acute horrors, including a Nazi concentration camp.
Kelly marvels at the grand arcs the small-town man's life has taken.
"He goes down the road, gets on the train, and ends up in the death camps in Belsen," she says. "Here was this young guy whose world was so circumscribed, and he ended up documenting open graves."
The experience of the war left the artist "bewildered," and with a recognition of the human potential for evil.
"I see life as inherently dangerous," Coville said. "I have an essentially dark view of the world and human affairs."
The dread and tension of the post-war age of anxiety shows itself in Colville's work, in the sense of menace or foreboding many people feel when they look at his paintings.
Kelly points out that during his years spent in Sackville he wasn't just an artist; he was also a teacher, a father, a husband.
He was "intensely tied to place," Kelly says, "and the house is at the centre of that."
But that is not to say his work is about Sackville, per se, or even his own life.
As much as the town and the elements of Colville's own domestic life - his home, his children, the family pets, his wife - serve as the models for the scenes and figures he paints, it is not a personal narrative.
"You can think about the art and then there's the life. Yes, there is an intersection, but they are not the same thing."
Colville's work, Kelly says, is about ideas.
"He is interested in the intellectual meaning of life. He has pursued that zealously in his own career," she says. "He is very interested in individuals and in understanding the individual's place in the world."
In Colville's own words, from a Maclean's interview: "In my work I am trying to do things that are a kind of statement of what it is like to be alive."
He does this, in part, by setting his work in everyday settings and moments: a couple at the beach, a woman in her kitchen.
"By isolating and focusing on such moments, he gives them a force or presence that is sometimes unsettling because they reveal what threatens the fragile equilibrium of human existence," writes Denise Leclerc, associate curator of modern Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada, in an essay for the Canada Council For the Arts.
As Kelly says, "we all understand the kitchen. He uses recognizable images into which he can insert larger ideas."
Colville provides us with "places we go into easily" to experience the things that matter to him.
"The house will do the same thing."
From the house, visitors can set out to explore Colville's Sackville, to see those places in the small town he depicted in his work: Mr. Wood in April in front of Cranewood, the university president's residence; the corner of Bridge and Main Streets in Milk Truck; the quarry where he set The Skater.
Then they can head to the Owens to take in the gallery's first-ever show of every one of the XXX Colville pieces in its permanent collection. The exhibition opened last night.
On a rainy morning in mid-June in a windowless storage room in the basement of the Owens, the show's curator, fine art conservator Jane Tisdale, sorts through a stacks of works on paper that are part of the show. It is the same building where Colville taught fine art from 1946 to 1963, when he retired from the classroom to paint full-time.
The exhibition's works range from seriagraphs and preparatory drawings to the exhaustive 88 sketches the artist did for Athletes, a large triptych mural commission he completed in 1961 for the then-new athletics centre, where it still hangs.
The drawings and sketches not only show the complex geometry that is the skeleton of Colville's work, but also his intense study of other details: one of the sketches for Athletes focuses just on the swimmer's toe, another on a running shoe.
"It is interesting for the audience to see how he builds his images," Tisdale says. "It reflects a lot of thought."
The drawings also show how he changes details as he works on a piece, such as the position of the runner's arms in Athletes, which are upraised in early drawings, but are by his side in the final canvas.
Beyond the mural itself, Colville meticulously detailed how the work would be hung, from a planter he designed along the floor below it down to the bolts that would anchor it to the wall.
He has always designed and built frames for all of his paintings.
"It goes back to how much thought he put into how the work was displayed," Tisdale says.
Other drawings, including a 1963 self-portrait sketch Colville didn't revisit for 17 years, until he painted Target Pistol and Man in 1980, reveals something else about the artist: "He keeps ideas in his head for a long time."
Tisdale says Colville House will help make explicit the connections between Colville, Sackville and his art.
"I think it helps pull everything together in a way that wouldn't be possible with just an exhibition."
Kelly calls it extraordinary that Colville was able to launch an international career from a town of 5,000 people. It is even more amazing considering Colville was a realist painter whose artistic coming-of-age took place in the midst of the abstract craze of the 1960s.
In a 1951 talk he gave at the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John, Colville rejected "art for art's sake" in favour of representational art with a message: "I regard art not as a means of soliloquizing, but as a means of communicating."
Despite these two strikes against him, Colville has gone on to an enviable career. In 2006, his 1953 painting Soldier and Girl at Station sold at a Sotheby's auction in Vancouver for $663,750. He has received the highest rank of the Order of Canada and honorary degrees from several Canadian universities. In 1967, he was commissioned to design Canada's centennial coins. Besides his time at Mount Allison, he has taught at universities in Edmonton, Santa Cruz, Berlin and Hong Kong. Retrospectives of his work have been shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1983); the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (1994); and the National Gallery of Canada (2000). His work has been exhibited around the world, in New York, Britain, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Germany, France, China, Japan and Hong Kong.
The Owens' last Colville exhibition, A Tribute to Alex Colville: Then and Now, was organized last year by the class of '57 to celebrate its 50-year reunion. The show included an early and a current work by 10 artists who had studied with Colville in the 1950s and '60s, as well as three works by the artist.
The gallery has launched programs related to the artist in the past, most recently A Teen's Guide to Alex Colville in Sackville.
Last year, Lucy MacDonald, curator of education and community outreach at the Owens, worked with a local Grade 7 class on the pamphlet. Through 11 sessions, the students learned about Colville, "through his work and his community," MacDonald says.
"They looked at Colville's connection to Sackville and thought about their own."
Most of the kids had been swimming at the athletics centre, for instance, but none had ever really stopped to look closely at Athletes.
Inspired by the triptych, the kids did sketches in their own gym class, taking turns playing lacrosse and subbing out to draw their classmates in action. They also wrote poems based on Colville's Seven Crows, studied geometry to understand the complex calculations that guided Colville's compositions, kept journals about their impressions, and sketched at the corner of Bridge and Main Streets.
"It wasn't about recreating Milk Truck," MacDonald says. "It was about being at the spot today."
The pamphlet opens up to a map of Colville's Sackville decorated with drawings and observations from the students.
"I wanted the guide to be active in the way the project had been active."
MacDonald, a graduate of Mount Allison, lived in Colville house when it was a student residence.
"It was a really special place to live, especially being a fine arts student," she says.
"One of the things I'm really interested in is finding a way of doing longer-term collaborations, not just an hour in the gallery," she says.
"I am interested in projects that result in tangible things and something like the guide, whose use can go beyond just the people who participated."
The guide is free at Colville House.
Although it opened to the public today, Colville House is still a work-in-progress, with renovations scheduled over the next nine months in preparation for its grand opening in May 2009.
Gemey Kelly says that she thinks the artist is pleased with the project.
"One of the profoundly interesting things about Alex Colville is that he is not looking for monuments to himself," she says. "The best legacy for him is to know there will be ongoing intellectual activity in his name."
Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.
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