Col 45

[Rodney C. Mackay]

Born in Toronto in 1920, David Alexander Colville and his family moved to Nova Scotia nine years later. He studied Fine Art at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick under Stanley Royle. At graduation in 1942 he married Rhoda Wright and enlisted in the Canadian army. In 1944 he went overseas as an Official War Artist to record his impressions of World War II. Unfortunately, this included the traumatic entry of the allies into Bergen Belsen.

After the war, Colville returned to Mount Allison to teach live drawing, painting and art history in the year 1946. His introduction to painting had been at part time classes held in an upstairs room over the Amherst Post Office in his home town in Nova Scotia. His first instructress had been Miss Holt, an associate at MOunt A', whose classes were visited by Stanley Royle, Colville said." He never commented at length on what he saw but must have liked Colvilles early efforts as he arranged a scholarship for him at Mount A'.

At Mount Allison Royle became a a "tutor", taking Colville into two areas of Maritime Canada during the summers of 1938 through 1942. They travelled to Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia and Victoria Corner, near Woodstock, New Brunswick for plein air painting. Colville admits copying Royle's style in a derivative way. He defined his mentor's work as deliberate, with thick layering and "broken, intense colour and a kind of Poussin-like composition, often with shadowed areas alternating with sunlit areas." Well! We are all forced to reject our fathers?

In one respect he remainded true to form: "There was much emphasis on construction; he did not encorage flashy techniques. Drawing was analysis." Colville still honours that tradition!