Stove

About Stove

This contemporary limited edition print featuring a woman and a dog beside a kitchen stove is by Alex Colville.

Alex Colville is one of Canada’s most celebrated and collected contemporary artists beloved internationally for his superb realistic paintings that captured moments of everyday domestic life. Colville was a painter, an engraver, a sketch artist and a muralist so popular during his lifetime that his artwork was reproduced in books, magazines, on coins and on television. The renowned author and critic, Robert Fulford dubbed him the ‘painter laureate’ of Canada for Colville’s artwork often focused on iconic national images.
Colville loved and owned several dogs. This serigraph (a fine quality silkscreen print) features his own wife, Rhoda and the family dog staring into the open door of a large black Aga Stove in the kitchen of their home. Stove was meticulously created by Colville himself specifically as a colour print. As with many of Colville’s pieces there is an unsettling, suspenseful feeling conveyed by the mystery of what they are looking at.

“If it were a question of reincarnation . . . I wouldn’t mind just being a dog. Their lives seem to me to be entirely innocent.” Alex Colville

“In Colville’s universe, however, such innocence inevitably masks some kind of looming danger. For each outward sign of calm or purity (a woman’s naked body, a golden meadow, a flat expanse of water), there is a corresponding suggestion of menace (a stormy sky, a gun on a table). In a Colville painting, it always seems as if something is about to happen.” Katherine Stauble, Author

FRAMED
29.5 × 29.5 in, 74.93 × 74.93 cm

Alex Colville was born in Toronto in 1920. He studied Fine Arts at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, which was where he met his wife, Rhoda.
Shortly after they were married in 1942, Colville joined the Canadian Army and became an official war artist. The trauma of war, and the horrific scenes he witnessed in concentration camps haunted him for the rest of his life. In 1929, he moved his wife and four children to Amherst, Nova Scotia and taught at Mount Allison. There he continued painting full time. In the decades that followed, he had a very successful artistic career and exhibited his work both in Canada and around the world. He received many honours, including the Governor General’s Award and the Order of Canada. In 1973, Alex and Rhoda Colville moved into her childhood home in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. He died in 2013.