January 1971

Curator: Alex Colville's 1971 acrylic painting, “January,” offers us an enigmatic tableau. My first impression is one of intense cold, both physically and emotionally. There’s a detachment in the composition. Editor: Detachment? I see precision. Look at the layering of materials: the heavy canvas, built up with meticulously applied acrylic-paint. The smooth surfaces reflecting the artificial lighting of the studio. Curator: Agreed. It's precise, almost hyper-realistic, but there's an undeniable psychological distance. The figure in the background, the artist himself in the foreground obscured by sunglasses and a hood… it feels voyeuristic, yet somehow alienated. How do social conventions shape that gaze? Editor: I’m more drawn to the materials themselves. Consider the hood. Likely a mass-produced item, contrasting with the individualized craft evident in, say, the handmade snowshoes of that period, implying a relationship with Canadian culture and the consumer marketplace. Curator: Precisely, and look how Colville deploys the self-portrait—a loaded genre with its own historical baggage—in a modernist framework, inviting us to question traditional notions of the artist's role. Was he conscious of playing with expectations, especially regarding his celebrity at the time? Editor: Colville worked diligently in egg tempera prior to embracing acrylic, a relatively new medium in 1971. He exploited its possibilities; its plasticity mirroring the constructed, almost staged, feeling of the painting, further mediated by those industrially produced sunglasses, which by this point in his life, would’ve surely impacted his artistic decisions and lifestyle. Curator: That makes me rethink the emotional coldness I felt at first. Perhaps it’s not coldness, but an analytical assessment of himself, his place within art history, and even, perhaps, an early recognition of image as commodity. Editor: Absolutely. For me, looking at "January" leads me to contemplate the cultural status of "the artist," while recognizing how this status both relied upon and departed from the material conditions and manufacturing processes around him. Curator: Thank you, the artwork, with your interpretation in mind, strikes me now as so very thought provoking!