This Colville painting is not plein air, but a rectrospective of war painted in 1946. It shows the…

[Rodney C. Mackay]

This Colville painting is not plein air, but a rectrospective of war painted in 1946. It shows the "rough, broken technique of painting" which his teacher, Stanley Royle, managed to bend in the direction of "subtlety of tone, and thin, rather smooth paint."

Colville has thanked his teacher for introducing him to mural painting, but this was never Colville's forte. That specialty still demands quick and rough brushwork, in the old days with tempera paint, which is to say pigments without a binder. Colville could do that but was never a master delineator on the large stage. He says that, as a student, his figures were executed from life and then incorporated into the larger world. The Mount A murals were executed on wood-pulp board (later termed Beaverboard, cream coloured on on side, greenish on the other), "painted in flat, thin oil paint mixed with beeswax thinned with turpentine."

David Alexander thought that it was "interesting" that Royle was not a figurative painter but "could see the value of this for students." A lucky break for Colville! A verbose man himself, he thought that Royle was "not an intellectual." Not the most damaging criticism of a teacher!

"What was his philosophy of art? I think he was a kind of pantheist who, to use Camus' phrase, thought of the "benign indifference of the universe" and found this in landscape, which for him was never threatening or dramtic. Along with a kind of craftsman's humility; he painted things which he hoped would sell; he sent works to all the usual art societies; he was in no sense a rebel or anarchist."

Colville seems to have rejected Royle's concept of non-threatening art, but was even less bohemian than that failed Marxist, and hardly the complete intellectual himself. "I see the human condition as tragic," he has sai