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Colville's family moved to Nova Scotia in 1929. He studied Fine Arts at Mount Allison University. In 1942, on graduation, Colville became a war artist with the Canadian Army. During World War II, he recorded in pencil sketches and paintings what he saw on the battlefields. Many of these images depict trench warfare, broken war machines and death, experiences which are said to have heavily influenced his later works, which have been called anxious, minimalist, surreal and existential. He taught at Mount Allison University from 1946 to 1963.
His drawings and paintings often involve meticulous planning and have a strict geometric underpinning that is then carried from the test sketch to the real painting. Colville stated on numerous occasions that he was an artist of the real and despised other artists who did not carry their work beyond the geometry or other abstract ideas in the heart of their work, hence the controversy regarding the style his paintings.
Colville typically calls himself a realistRealism is commonly defined as a concern for fact or reality and rejection of the impractical and visionary. However, the term realism is used, with varying meanings, in several of the liberal arts; particularly painting, literature, and philosophy. It is, while many critics and art lovers have chosen to see him as a magic realistMagic Realism (or Magical Realism is an illustrative or literary technique in which the laws of cause and effect seem not quite to apply in otherwise real world situations. The term 'magic realism' was first used by the German art critic Frank Roh to desc. Indeed, his peculiar landscapes, settings and characters, though often desolate, often have an internal conflict, stemming from the ever-present, yet unseen pattern of geometric design. The difficulty of categorizing his work is in itself a unique mark of his art and is possibly an implicit comment on issues of existentialismExistentialism is a philosophical movement characterized by an emphasis on individualism, individual freedom, and subjectivity. Existentialism emphasises the idea that existence precedes essence, i. that one must be alive in order to create meaning, and t and alienationAlienation is estrangement or splitting apart. In law, "alienation" refers to a transfer of title. In medicine, "alienation" can refer to a splitting apart of the faculties of the mind; an " alienist" is an old name for a psychiatrist. In sociology, "alie in the world from which Colville drew his ideas and images.