Alex Colville a Master of Realism, Essay Example

“Against a regiment I oppose a brain, and a dark horse against an armored train.” (Roy Campbell, AGO, 2014) Alex Colville’s Horse and Train is one of the most well-known paintings. Alex Colville depicts a mastery of the realism art form in creating his art pieces, specifically in the Horse and Train (1954), which hangs now at the Art Gallery of Ontario, using the elements of colours, lines, and movement. His unique style that is both influence by the classicism and neoclassicism, to create a realism style art work. The following art analysis will focus on the art elements and use of realism to explain how Colville is able to combine the artistic elements to create a movement.

The Horse and Train, was created by using glazed tempera. Within the painting, we can look at how the horse is symbolic to the artist and to the overall aspects of the art work. Colville uses conjointly the types of motion both in which is depicted in the movement in the train, and then in the horse. The Horse and Train, is represented by the bare-backed horse used in the picture-space, where it gallops along the railway, to which a speeding train is coming in the opposite direction. The twilight sky is reflected on the railways, and the headlights of the steam locomotive, provide an ominous mood to set a foreboding result. The viewer is left to ponder the impending results, as the artist decided to leave it to the viewer’s imagination. Colville blends the art elements of balance, proportion, and symmetry in painting a setting of both ambiguity and anxiety.

In using the elements of lines, Colville creates a picturesque painting in which invokes the realism of a still photo, but is created using oils in broad and fine lines. The combination of the geometric elements of shape and lines helps the artwork depict a real setting. Not using harsh lines, but instead settling on a soft texture with a close water-like sheen. His works is closely related to the works of Piero dellaFrancesa, and the use of colouring is combined with his take on geometric elements. The dark colours create a sad or melancholy atmosphere that is brought out with both the train and the horse used as silhouettes against the gray coloured sky. The picture shows an open and flat landscape, extenuating by the twilight from the sky. The sky’s fading luminosity helps to reflect the metal rails of the train tracks that helps with his style of realism. The painting shows how Colville used the smoke from the trains, to be depicted as streams the flow across the canvas horizontally, to make the viewer look directly at the horse.

Using the balance of the colours, the viewer’s eyes are drawn towards both the dark horse, and the dark armoured train. His use of colours helps in portraying the elements of form and space. He uses the dark colours to flatten the objects, and the proportions of light and colours to create an environment represented by the textural detail presented in sculptural molding. He uses the style of realism to create the fine art style, where color interests with the sources of surrounding light to alter the original color of the painting. The luminous effect is achieved skillfully by playing on the tonal contrast to represent the slightest bit of light shown through the white steam from the locomotive, and through the gray patterned clouds.  The composition of both the gray, white, and dark colours creates and imaginative but yet realistic scene, that creates an intense mood.  Horse and Train, uses the elements from the light of the sky to reflect off the dark colours of the other objects within the painting to show how it is altered by the space and the location.

In using the geometric elements, he uses an asymmetrical composition of the large dark horse that dominates the large proportion of the painting. The uses the contrast of the large dark horse, and the small dark train provides a heightening dramatic impact. It also draws on the use of atmospheric perspectives with use of the train drawn in the luminescent sky background. The white steam from the locomotive painted horizontally across the sky help to highlight the effects of the gray sky, and provide a linear perspective for the viewers.  The lines used help to make the objects of the painting pop out to the viewer. The train tracks are drawn with lines moving from where the train begins to where the horse is traveling, to provide depth to the painting. The horizontal lines used of the train tracks provides movement that helps in creating a composition between time and space. The movement helps in looking like the train is moving towards the viewer. More importantly, the relation of the position of the horse, helps to create a relationship with the audience and the focal point of the painting. The scale at which the locomotive is drawn, and where the horse is positioned, having a large body and a small head, made it appear more realistic, than just another painting. Relative to the landscape, the horses draws correlation between the artist’s style and thought, and the use of the painting to draw mystery and the use of imagery to create drama.

Colville himself didn’t rely on still photographs to draw inspiration but instead used his imagination in sketching down objects and translating to a canvas. His mastery in the area of realism could be interpreted as high realism, magic realism, or photo realism.  His use of lines, space, and balance to create an arduous technique of making objects on a flat surface come to life. He takes real objects such as the horse and the train, and creates the modular structures shown on a proportioned scale. Much like classic works depicted during the Renaissance era, Colville shows his mathematical control of the canvas in producing the effects of volume and depth, while only having a free-standing and flat canvas.  He draws on the elements of magic realism to make precise renderings of realistic details using linear and atmospheric perspectives to use lines and shapes with super real elements, in a way that makes a timeless or dream-like quality. For Horse and Train, his painting is reduced to the mathematical expression with the use of unequivocally spatial construction on the canvas. The geometric use of balance in his painting reflects on the aspects of realism, in which he uses the bleak landscape to juxtaposition the horse versus the locomotive train in both similar forms and textures.

In Horse and Train, the lines, the positions, the shapes, and other elements of the paper depict the artistry of movement, also the painting is on a flat surface. Realism, is painted with the regard of showing real imagery, or the imagery of real objects in their natural setting. For the Horse and Train, the way in which he shows the horse galloping, with the horse’s legs in motion, shows how he used the space to show movement. Perspective spacing is an element shown in the painting. He uses the combinations of large-scale composition, anatomy of both the horse and the train, perspective, and mathematics to show off his specialized techniques in painting the art piece. The illusory projection of the scene, helps the artist show a movement in a fixed space, much like they were frozen in time.

In looking at Colville’s use of art elements, he is able to achieve the feats of space and time. He uses both geometric and mathematics in order to show an approach of temporality that is stretched out ecstatically, with his attention to hyperreal rendering of surfaces and application of brush strokes. His ordering of space is used in a system of proportion that the viewer is deeply involved in the events of the painting. The way in which the horse is positioned with its back to the audience, and the depiction of the train coming from a distance, helps create movement in which time and motion are ongoing.  Although the painting is still, there is absolute movement caught in the space of time that the scene is showing. His use of layering in his painting techniques, exaggerated through his use of dark and light colouring, creates a space and time rendering in which, makes for fragment movements or moments of stasis. This technique, and attention and detail, could only be mastered by an artist such as Colville that relies on elements of realism. Colville creates his unit painting, using the aspects of lines, movement, and colours to depict the aspects of movement to depict the style of realism. His use of geometric shapes, tonal colouring, and the use of soft texture help to create a picturesque scene that correlates to both space and time. The viewer is able to be a part of the scene, through Colville’s application of scale, balance, and positioning.

Works Cited

“Alex Colville.” AGO. 2014. Web. 29 October 2014.http://www.ago.net/alex-colville

Colville, Alex. Horse and Train. Art Gallery of Ontario. 1954. Painting.

“Inherent Danger.” Welcome to Colville. AGO. 2014. Web. 29 October 2014. http://www.welcometocolville.ca/inherent-danger#image02