Lot # 018

Alexander Colville
PC CC 1920 - Canadian

French Cross
acrylic polymer emulsion on board
on verso signed, titled and dated 1988
22 1/4 x 31 1/2 in  56.5 x 80cm

Provenance:
Private Collection, Toronto

Literature:
David Burnett, Alex Colville, The Drabinsky Gallery, 1991, reproduced page 10
Mark A. Cheetham, The Observer Observed, 1994, page 91
Philip Fry, Alex Colville, Paintings, Prints and Processes 1983 - 1994, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995, reproduced page 81
Philip Fry, Alex Colville, Embarkation: The Genesis of a Painting, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995, reproduced page 14
Tom Smart, Alex Colville: Return, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2003, reproduced page 106

Exhibited:
The Drabinsky Gallery, Toronto, Alex Colville, October 19 - November 13, 1991
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Alex Colville, Paintings, Prints and Processes 1983 - 1994, September 30, 1994 - January 15, 1995, catalogue #17

French Cross is one of Alex Colville's most engaging images. Its focus on the history of the Acadians in Canada and on recent immigration and the sense of belonging in a community make it unusually topical in his oeuvre. At the same time, the painting amply demonstrates many of Colville's abiding concerns and working methods.

While all aspects of this work are observed and rendered with Colville's signature precision, French Cross is a complex amalgam of elements and ideas that we can trace to different times and locales. The deportation cross has stood since 1924 at Grand Pré, a few kilometers from Colville's long-time home in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. The monument marks the forced expulsion of Acadians by the British in 1755, following the war between France and Britain that had begun in 1744. Colville has focused intensely on his local surroundings for most of his long artistic career, feeling that the important elements in life are nearby and in a sense routine. He was intrigued by the cross, making drawings of it in 1983. The mysterious image that we see now - with the young woman on horseback looking back at the marker, inviting us to wonder what she saw and was thinking - only crystallized for Colville some years later. "I had a brainwave," the painter recalls, "that I could use this Chinese girl, whose house I would cycle by every day." He drew and photographed her on her horse, then constructed the perfect geometrical unity of the final painting to affect a double temporality. Colville accomplishes much through this careful design.

The rider looks back, her eyes tilting up towards the commemorative plaque on the cross. Horse and rider, however, are carefully placed in front of the monument. They exist now, with the viewer, both spatially and chronologically. Typically, Colville contrasts the animal and human worlds while insisting on their potential harmony. The horse sees where it is going; the young woman sees more, even while she gazes back. In conversation, Colville stresses the racial extraction of the rider: she is the daughter of a Chinese father and a Caucasian mother. As Colville later discovered (and confirming his intuition about the composition) the girl was descended from the Acadians on her mother's side. He affirms her sense of belonging in Wolfville through the harmonies of the landscape depicted, yet she is clearly also aware of the forced migration (Le Grand Dérangement, the great uprooting, as it is called), of the Acadian people two centuries earlier. Harmony with place, with animals, with relationships - all are crucial to Colville's world view. In French Cross, he affirms the importance of history and tradition by implying that our sense of belonging can easily and quickly be destroyed by events. The Acadians' sense of home was obliterated by the British in ways analogous to the Acadians' earlier displacement of aboriginal peoples from this region.

Much of Colville's art is about making choices, whether compositional and thematic as the artist, or in terms of one's personal life. He believes in taking action, not in accepting fate. Both elements exist in French Cross: the 18th-century Acadians were in no position to defy their unjust deportation, but the rider could have chosen to pass by the cross she knows so well, to ignore it. Instead she looks back and remembers, with the result that historical tragedy and suffering stalk this painting. Colville has us meditate on evanescent origins and all-too-real displacement. But the young woman's accord with her surroundings suggests that the image is ultimately redemptive. Change is inevitable, Colville shows, yet - if we choose to view it this way - it can restore as well as destroy harmony.

We thank Mark A. Cheetham, Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Toronto and author of Alex Colville: The Observer Observed, for contributing the above essay.

Preview at: Heffel Fine Art Inc. Toronto