I
n Alex Colville’s paintings animals and humans often occupy mutually dependant yet contrasting positions. The humans strive – they are always doing something, even if it is as quiet an action as repose. His human subjects are engaged in tasks, involved, consciously acting out their humanity – becoming rather than simply being. Because humans are always doing, we are also always thinking. Animals, on the other hand, simply are. An animal’s world is immediate, it does not need to be parsed or examined, indeed, it cannot be. Animals are fully at home in the world, as we are not. We are cast into a chaotic world, and the certainty and stability of order is hard-won. An animal is in a state of innocence and cannot recognize chaos, nor yearn for order.
In Dog and Priest the human and the animal overlap, with the figure of the priest behind the sitting dog. The man’s head is obscured, we mostly see his back-clad body, reclining on a wharf. Our own sense of our body in space tells us that the priest’s arm should be under tension, supporting his weight as he reclines, yet the arm seems weightless, floating. This subtle disjunction between sight and bodily awareness adds tension to the image, to tighten the focus on what is at first glance a simple scene. The dog, sitting upright, almost rigid, seems to quiver with alertness, another contrast, as the priest’s pose could almost be described as languid.
Both figures face the ocean, looking across the Minas Basin to a headland on the opposite shore and beyond to the open expanse of the Bay of Fundy. We, however, are looking at this pair who fill our visual range, making the traditional landscape view almost superfluous. Colville’s pair of black figures seem to merge into a single form. The dog’s head and alertly gazing eye stands in as the features of the priest. The dog, blocking our view of its master, is serving a protective role. The priest’s uniform also conveys a sense of a protective quality, of the adopted role as caretaker or shepherd of a human flock. Both figures exist to serve. But to serve what? For the dog, service is ingrained, biological. The dog can no more exercise informed free will than it can fly. The priest, presumably, has chosen his role. And it perhaps it is this contrast between nature and culture that it at the heart of this deceptively simple painting.
The figure of the priest, while based on a real person known to the artist, is actually depicted as being the painter himself – or at least the back of the figure’s head reminds us of Colville’s many self-portraits. Colville is looking at us looking at him, “the observer, observed.” Order from chaos, seeing versus merely looking, being and becoming, these are but a few of the tensions and contrasts Colville builds into his paintings. Steeped in the post-war Existentialism of thinkers such as Camus, Sartre, and Arendt, Colville was an artist who thought in images. In a speech in the mid-1950s he described himself as a “conceptual” artist, contrasting that with what he called a “perceptual” approach: “The perceptive artist,” he said, “is at the mercy of his experience in the sense that he must rely upon what he chances to encounter or see; perceiving or seeing for the conceptual artist is a process that is used to confirm or to modify what he has already determined.”
The figure of the priest, while based on a real person known to the artist, is actually depicted as being the painter himself – or at least the back of the figure’s head reminds us of Colville’s many self-portraits. Colville is looking at us looking at him, “the observer, observed.”
What did Colville determine in Dog and Priest? Each viewer will draw something different from their conversation with the painting as they experience this work. The contrast between the profound presence of the dog and its complete inhabitation of the now, and the symbolism of the priest as a figure of faith, somewhat obscured and receding into the background, a figure committed to a hope for a world beyond this one, is one possible reading. Two shepherds, one protecting the now, the other protecting a wished-for future, is another. Dog and Priest is about service, and about faith. Colville strove to imbue the everyday with heightened symbolic content, to achieve the kind of near-universal communication once possible with the religious iconography of early European painting. It conveys more than we can express in words and does so all at once. It is both instantly recognizable and inexhaustible. What did Colville determine? There is no right answer, just a process and a hope that we can make sense of our being in the world.
