Colville

Colville (2014) by Andrew Hunter – Art Gallery of Ontario

ISBN: 9781894243759
Condition: As New
Published: 2014
Offered by: Crappy Old Books

There are artists who paint cheerful landscapes, artists who paint bowls of fruit, and artists who apparently spend their entire careers wondering whether the family dog knows something that the rest of us don’t. Alex Colville belongs firmly in the third category.

Published by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2014, Colville, by Andrew Hunter, is a substantial and beautifully illustrated exploration of one of Canada’s most extraordinary painters. It is also an invitation into a world where absolutely nothing seems to be happening, yet somehow everything feels as though it might be about to go terribly wrong.

Colville’s paintings are masterpieces of controlled unease. A woman looks out of a window. A man stands beside a horse. A dog regards the world with an expression of quiet suspicion. Trains approach, figures contemplate the horizon, and ordinary domestic scenes acquire the unsettling atmosphere of a psychological thriller in which somebody has forgotten to explain the plot.

This is realism, certainly, but not quite as we know it. Colville’s meticulous compositions, precise geometry and almost supernatural stillness transform apparently mundane moments into something altogether stranger. His subjects inhabit a recognisable world, yet one in which time appears to have stopped for reasons that nobody is prepared to discuss.

Andrew Hunter’s accompanying examination places these remarkable works within the wider context of Colville’s life, experiences and artistic development, including his service as an official Canadian war artist during the Second World War. The resulting volume considers the relationship between observation, memory, violence, intimacy and the peculiar business of being alive.

The book also reveals the extraordinary discipline behind Colville’s seemingly effortless images. Nothing is accidental. Every figure, shadow, horizon and suspiciously philosophical animal has been placed with mathematical precision. Even the apparent emptiness feels meticulously organised.

Richly illustrated and thoughtfully presented, this is a splendid volume for admirers of Canadian art, twentieth-century realism and paintings that become increasingly unsettling the longer one looks at them. It is equally suitable for anybody who has ever suspected that an ordinary suburban afternoon might conceal profound existential significance.

Condition: As New. An exceptionally well-preserved copy, showing no meaningful evidence of the usual indignities inflicted upon art books by careless owners, overcrowded shelves or people who insist on balancing coffee mugs on expensive publications.

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where the books aren’t necessarily crappy, the art is frequently magnificent, and the occasional unsettling Canadian masterpiece is entirely welcome.

A fascinating celebration of a painter who demonstrated that you don’t need melting clocks, screaming figures or exploding landscapes to disturb an audience. Sometimes all you need is a perfectly ordinary person, a perfectly ordinary room, and the uncomfortable suspicion that something is not quite right.

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