Ordinary Magic: A Biographical Sketch of Alex Colville

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Ordinary Magic combines a substantial text, written in a clear and
pleasant style, with numerous black-and-white photographs of Alex
Colville’s life and works as well as 35 full-page, full-color
reproductions of Colville’s recent paintings. The text, which is both
critical and biographical, affords a penetrating look at both the man
and his paintings by a longtime friend. J.R.C. Perkin was President of
Acadia University when Colville was Chancellor. Both men have long been
residents of the town of Wolfville in the Annapolis Valley of Nova
Scotia. The text emerges not only from extensive research but from
unhurried conversation between the friends and colleagues.

As Perkin writes, Colville’s place in Canadian art is assured: “He
has taken ordinary things and touched them with a magic that
occasionally comforts, usually intrigues and almost invariably makes us
reflect on the experience we call life.” Colville’s images are
mathematically precise and attentive to a technological world, yet
deeply human. Perkin explores this paradox with probing comments on the
paintings; Colville’s images, Perkin writes, show how “the quality
of human life is threatened by the very forces which may also enrich it,
yet life itself is immeasurably valuable.”

Although more a “sketch” than a full biography, the book, which
includes a selected bibliography, is handsomely designed and produced on
fine paper. All of Colville’s work for the past decade is presented
here for the first time and this is a valuable study of a major Canadian
artist.