David Alexander (Alex) Colville (born August 24 1920 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian painter.

Colville's family moved to Nova Scotia in 1929. He studied Fine Arts at Mount Allison University. In 1942, on graduation, Colville became a war artist with the Canadian Army. During World War II, he recorded in pencil sketches and paintings what he saw on the battlefields. Many of these images depict trench warfare, broken war machines and death, experiences which are said to have heavily influenced his later works, which have been called anxious, minimalist, surreal and existential. He taught at Mount Allison University from 1946 to 1963.

His drawings and paintings often involve meticulous planning and have a strict geometric underpinning that is then carried from the test sketch to the real painting. Colville stated on numerous occasions that he was an artist of the real and despised other artists who did not carry their work beyond the geometry or other abstract ideas in the heart of their work, hence the controversy regarding the style his paintings.

Colville typically calls himself a realist, while many critics and art lovers have chosen to see him as a magic realist. Indeed, his peculiar landscapes, settings and characters, though often desolate, often have an internal conflict, stemming from the ever-present, yet unseen pattern of geometric design. The difficulty of categorizing his work is in itself a unique mark of his art and is possibly an implicit comment on issues of existentialism and alienation in the world from which Colville drew his ideas and images.

In 1992, Colville was named to the Queen's Privy Council for Canada in honour of his work. The appointement allows him to use the the honorific The Honourable before his name with the postnomial letters P.C. after his name.

Trivia

• His painting "Horse and Train" (1954), was inspired by two lines from the poet Roy Campbell:

Against a regiment I oppose a brain

And a dark horse against an armored train.

• "Horse and Train" appears on the cover of the album Night Vision by Bruce Cockburn.
• Colville provided the designs used on coins minted in Canada's centennial year, 1967.
• He was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in 1982.

External link

• Courage Remembered