Alex Colville: Paintings, Prints and Processes, 1983-1994

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.

This catalogue for a 1994 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibition of
Alex Colville’s recent work reproduces 25 paintings and 10 serigraphs
in color, along with 346 sketches and preparatory drawings and an
impressive text. The color plates are stunning, the drawings surprising
in their detail and mathematical nature.

Fry begins by acknowledging his debt to pioneer studies of Colville by
Helen Dow and David Burnett, and by thanking the painter himself for his
“insights” and answers to questions. Colville’s work is deceptive,
and Fry’s analysis is fresh and intriguing. He explores in depth the
puzzles and challenges posed by Colville’s paintings; his analysis
owes as much to philosophy as to aesthetics. Of Cyclist and Crow, for
example, Fry writes: “It illuminates and heightens our sensitivity to
the fleeting and mysterious experience which we call being present.”
Fry calls this scene of a woman cyclist who casts no shadow on a field
of summer barley despite the sunlight that shapes her own body “a
timeless self-contained world in an eternal present.”

As with the work of modernist M.C. Escher and indeed many of the
Renaissance painters, mathematical calculations underlie Colville’s
art. Below a surface of Magic Realism lies a web of emotions, spiritual
and ethical values, dangers, and possibilities.

Printed on fine paper with a glossy, noncurling paper cover, Philip
Fry’s Alex Colville makes a valuable contribution to the growing body
of studies of this important 20th-century Canadian painter.