The Art of Alex Colville


Book Description

A study of the man and his work.




Alex Colville


Book Description

While serving as a Canadian war artist in Europe during the Second World War, Alex Colville (1920-2013) was immersed in the overwhelming nihilism and horror of the period, witness to the enactment of humanity's darkest possibilities. Colville's war-time experience ultimately animated his remarkable painting career. The style of representational painting he developed-where realism is heightened by the artist's assertion of order through composition-expresses the tenets of his personal revolt against chaos and despair; if these prospects lurk in even his most intimate, domestic images, so also do order and hope, charging Colville's art with tension and vitality.




The Mystery of the Real


Book Description

The work of Alex Colville, O.C. (1920-2013), one of the great modern realist painters, combines the Flemish detail of Andrew Wyeth, the eerie foreboding of George Tooker and the anguished confrontations of Lucian Freud. Behind the North Americans stands their common master, Edward Hopper. Colville's works are in many museums in Canada and Germany. He has affinities with Max Beckmann and appeals to the German "secondary virtues": cleanliness, punctuality, love of order. In a long life he resolutely opposed the fashionable currents of abstract and expressionistic art. In contrast to Jackson Pollock's wild action painting, Colville created paintings of contemplation and reflection. As Jeffrey Meyers writes: I spent several days with Colville on each of three visits from California to Wolfville. I received seventy letters from him between August 1998 and April 2010, and kept thirty-six of my letters to him. He sent me photographs and slides of his work and, in his eighties, discussed the progress and meaning of the paintings he completed during the last decade of his life. His handwritten letters, precisely explaining his thoughts and feelings, provide a rare and enlightening opportunity to compare my insights and interpretations with his own intentions and ideas. He also discussed his family, health, sexuality, politics, reading, travels, literary interests, our mutual friend Iris Murdoch, response to my writing, his work, exhibitions, sales of his pictures and of course the meaning of his art. His letters reveal the challenges he faced during aging and illness, and his determination to keep painting as health difficulties mounted. He stopped writing to me when he became seriously ill two years before his death. In this context the late paintings, presented in colour in this book, take on a new poignancy.




Bad Boy


Book Description

In Bad Boy, renowned American artist Eric Fischl has written a penetrating, often searing exploration of his coming of age as an artist, and his search for a fresh narrative style in the highly charged and competitive New York art world in the 1970s and 1980s. With such notorious and controversial paintings as Bad Boy and Sleepwalker, Fischl joined the front ranks of America artists, in a high-octane downtown art scene that included Andy Warhol, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, and others. It was a world of fashion, fame, cocaine and alcohol that for a time threatened to undermine all that Fischl had achieved. In an extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Fischl discusses the impact of his dysfunctional family on his art—his mother, an imaginative and tragic woman, was an alcoholic who ultimately took her own life. Following his years as a student at Cal Arts and teaching in Nova Scotia, he describes his early years in New York with the artist April Gornik, just as Wall Street money begins to encroach on the old gallery system and change the economics of the art world. Fischl rebelled against the conceptual and minimalist art that was in fashion at the time to paint compelling portraits of everyday people that captured the unspoken tensions in their lives. Still in his thirties, Eric became the subject of a major Vanity Fair interview, his canvases sold for as much as a million dollars, and The Whitney Museum mounted a major retrospective of his paintings. Bad Boy follows Fischl’s maturation both as an artist and sculptor, and his inevitable fall from grace as a new generation of artists takes center stage, and he is forced to grapple with his legacy and place among museums and collectors. Beautifully written, and as courageously revealing as his most provocative paintings, Bad Boy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the passion and politics of the art world as it has rarely been seen before.




Alex Colville


Book Description

Charting the prodigious life and career of one of Canada's best-known artists, this illustrated biography shows Alex Colville as both artist and public figure, engaging many worlds at once—from painting and politics to creativity and business. He has been given some of the highest honors for his art, but he has also been charged with misogyny, opportunism, and crowd-pleasing. This compelling profile ultimately attempts to answer the question, Where is the truth among all these contradictions?







Frida and Diego


Book Description

A visual feast of Kahlo and Rivera's finest works that will leave readers intellectually challenged and emotionally awakened. He painted for the people. She painted to survive. Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) and Diego Rivera's (1886-1957) legendary passion for each other and for Mexico's revolutionary culture during the 1920s and 1930s made them two of the twentieth century's most famous artists. During their life together as a married couple, Rivera achieved prominence as a muralist, while Kahlo's intimate paintings were embraced by the Surrealist movement and the Mexican art world. After their deaths in the 1950s, retrospectives of Kahlo's work enshrined her as one of the most significant women artists of the twentieth century, partially eclipsing Rivera's international fame as Mexico's greatest muralist painter. Frida & Diego: Passion, Politics and Painting offers a new perspective on their artistic significance for the twenty-first century, one that shows how their paintings reflect both the dramatic story of their lives together and their artistic commitment to the transformative political and cultural values of post-revolutionary Mexico. Frida & Diego features colour reproductions of 75 paintings and works on paper by both Kahlo and Rivera, rarely reproduced archival photographs, and new biographical information on the couple assembled by scholar Dot Tuer.




The Book of the Dog


Book Description

Featuring all kinds of dogs – big, small, graceful, cute, funny – The Book of the Dog is a cool and quirky collection of dog art and illustration by artists around the world. Interspersed through the illustrations are short texts about the artists and different breeds, paying homage to man's best friend. Beautifully designed and packaged, the book will appeal to dog lovers of all ages.




Tom Forrestall


Book Description

This beautifully illustrated volume explores the range, depth, and visual poetry of Tom Forrestall’s work as a painter of magical realism. It explores the development of his characteristic style and the genesis of his shaped paintings, the origins, limitations, and use of his egg tempera technique, and Forrestall's choice of subject matter and its relationship to defining a poetry of place. Curator and critic Tom Smart also examines the artist’s spirituality as expressed directly and symbolically in his imagery, the relationship between his sketchbooks, personal written reflections, and paintings, and how Forrestall's art relates to analogous contemporary movements in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Historical facts, critical opinions, anecdotes, artist writings and statements, and Tom Smart’s own analysis of the works are combined in a book that illuminates the artist’s work for readers while also providing the contexts needed to appreciate it.




Christopher Pratt


Book Description

Christopher Pratt is one of Canada's most prominent painters and printmakers. His reputation was solidified with the celebrated retrospective of his work at the National Gallery of Canada in 2005. The intense realism of Christopher Pratt's art is, at first glance, deceptively simple. But behind the recognizable images lie deeper meanings. Pratt's search for a reality that is magical and mysterious gives his work its uncanny and haunting qualities. Since the day in the mid-1950s when Pratt first saw the painting Early Sunday Morning by the renowned American realist, Edward Hopper, he has perfected his ability to represent the qualities of natural and artificial light. Pratt stands in the line of other great Canadian artists, including Alex Colville, Lawren P. Harris, Jean Paul Lemieux and Lionel LeMoine Fitzgerald, all of whom influenced him and the way he represents the land. Others who figured in his development include Americans Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper and Thomas Eakins. The unique and beautiful island of Newfoundland, with its culture, history, geography and weather, has also influenced his work. This handsomely designed book, published in association with the Art Gallery of Sudbury, traces Pratt's development as a painter and printmaker from his early watercolors through to the iconic paintings of his mature years. It features more than 100 works, all beautifully reproduced, many of which have never been published before. Christopher Pratt was born in 1935 in St. John's, Newfoundland. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art and at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, New Brunswick, and is universally acknowledged as one of the most important Canadian artists of the period. His work is included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the Musée d'Art Contemporain of Montreal and Memorial University of Newfoundland, as well as in private and corporate collections in North America and around the world. He is represented by the Mira Godard Gallery in Toronto. Pratt lives and works in the village of St. Mary's Bay on the Salmonier River in Newfoundland. Over the years, he has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with exhibitions in New York (1976); at Canada House Cultural Centre Gallery in London, England (an exhibition that traveled to Paris, Brussels and Dublin in 1982-83); and at the 49th Parallel Gallery in New York (1988).