Colville Tributes

by Alex Colville

There are few modern Canadian painters whose work has captured our collective imagination to the extent that Alex Colville’s has. Born in 1920, Colville served as a Canadian war artist in the Second World War and taught Fine Arts at Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB, before embarking on a career as a full-time artist. His paintings, often described in terms of magic realism, have found an international following. In celebration of Colville’s ninetieth birthday in 2010, Gaspereau Press commissioned essays on Colville’s life and work from four contributors–two German and two Canadian. The resulting collection provides an intimate and thought-provoking reflection on both the artist and his work.

93 pages, Paperback

About the author

David Alexander Colville (August 24, 1920 – July 16, 2013) was a Canadian painter and printmaker.

After being in the Canadian army for two years, and because he was a fine-arts student, Colville was made an Official Second World War artist in May 1944.
He continued on to tours in the Netherlands and Germany, where he was also tasked with depicting the horrors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

After the war, Colville became a faculty member with the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University, where he taught from 1946 to 1963. He moved to Wolfville, Nova Scotia in 1973, where he lived and painted for the remainder of his life.