#alex coleville

[oliverscarlin]

Alex Coleville - Horse and Train (1954)

[nick9times]

Heat   -  1997

Michael Mann

Pacific - 1967

Alex Coleville

[visuallycurious]

Alex Coleville

Bodies in a Grave, 1946

Drawing: pencil on paper

Painting: oil on canvas, 30" x 40"

Alex Coleville was with the British troops at the concentration camp, Belsen.  They found more than 10 000 unburied bodies.  I cannot imagine the horror and grief of being in the presence of such an atrocity.  Coleville's detached perspective comes through here -- he says "the body has its own defence mechanism." 

The drawing has much more power than the belaboured painting. 

There is a directness to those lines, a sensitivity of observation, and a willingness to let things remain unsaid.  The line searches, questions, and revises, while facing incomprehensible suffering and unjustice.  The white paper leaves an emotional space, not cluttered with detail, for those charged lines to reverberate.

[visuallycurious]

Alex Coleville Study for Church and Horse, 1964 pencil and inks on paper main sheet: 13 7/8 x 16 3/4 in. with fold-outs: 19 x 33 3/4 in

Church and Horse, 1964.

Acrylic on hardboard, 55.5 x 68.7 cm.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Purchase, 1966.

[darkhard]