The Fundy Film Society

Colville

This portrait of Canadian painter Alex Colville (b. 1920) uses many of the artist’s intimate, unsettling canvases to illustrate how his 60-year relationship with his wife Rhoda is reflected in his oeuvre. The film shows Colville’s work in the light of important events in his personal life, focusing on his decades spent in Wolfville, Nova Scotia and placing the artist’s austere, raw realism in context. ‘As a true realist, I must reinvent the world,’ believes Colville.

The most famous living Canadian artist, his style is similar to Edward Hopper’s. He chooses his subjects from his immediate environment, the everyday routines of a Maritime province. The university town of Wolfville, the Evangeline beach with Cape Blomidon visible in the background, the Gaspereau Valley, the snaking tidal waters of Grand Pré: Colville records the fleeting intensity of the present moment with masterful control. He completes only two or three paintings per year. The mysterious power of his works, the muted distress they convey, are testament to the time he devotes to each of them.

A documentary film crew spent six weeks at home with the artist, accompanying him as he went about his day, far from the limelight of the art world – a thoroughly unspectacular solitude that nonetheless enables him to produce a spectacular, powerful body of work.