Colville, All Killed..

[Rodney C. Mackay]

This image of a dead German soldier was also painted a year after the end of the war. It is not surprising that Colville's post-war world became "unsettling and uncompromising." His lexicon of expressionism from then on became: "absence, loss, emptiness, disquiet, mystery, alienation, anxiety, menace, imprisonment,discordant, obsessive, evil, absurdity, melancholic, dolorous, malevolent, painful, dislocated, oblivious, sombre, sinister, unsettling, lugubrious." War had robbed him of the ability to be a happy man, but had given him a unique perspective on a dirty world.

Rokwell Kent noted: "There are undoubtedly moments in many men's experience that are in themselves a consummation of every impulse to expression.There may have been men who have achieved in their lives such enduring happiness or such self-containedness that they have given nothing to the world outside themelves. But history knows no self-contained ones, none - who, having felt and understood profoundly much, have had no nbeed to talk of it (1928)." His was a different time and he had quite different reasons for finding the world a dangerous place!

Colville returned home with a less provincial view of the interaction between man and his environments. He told CBC's Life and Times that "what troubles people about my work, in which they find mystery and intrigue, may well be the idea that ordinary things are important." His paintings which had been mostly landscapes in his student years now shifted away from that "refuge from life."

Stanley Royle both courted and rejected the careerist Salon societies and so did his star pupil. Colville once expressed the idea that his own rejection of group endeavours was an inheritance from this man, but it has to be remembered that he had a rocky start as a child battling pneumonia. War and disease can be alienating events and Colville received further buffeting from art critics.