Vendu pour : 8 125 $

PROVENANCE
Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto
Masters Gallery Ltd., Vancouver
Private Collection

BIBLIOGRAPHIE
David Burnett, Colville, The Art Gallery of Ontario, 1983, reproduced pages 8 and 9 and listed on page 252, catalogue raisonné #140 and #141
David Burnett, Alex Colville: Prints, 1985, reproduced pages 18 and 19 and listed page 2

In 1974, Alex Colville produced a series of twelve paintings relating to the twelve months of the year. Developed from the paintings, this album was later published in a limited edition of 75 and consisted of twelve photolithographs, a preface signed and editioned by the artist and a serigraph made by the artist especially for this portfolio entitled Hotel Maid. Outside of the edition, there were 25 artist proofs (indicated by roman numerals) which were reserved for the owners of the original paintings, the publishers and the artist. Published by Fischer Fine Art Limited, London and Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto, this portfolio is editioned 63/75.

An edition of Book of Hours - Labours of the Months is included in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

Please note: Hotel Maid is framed, the other prints are matted but unframed.

The overall portfolio dimensions are 17 x 15 x 2.75 ins, 43.2 x 38.1 x 7 cms.



Colville - The Making of The Labours of the Months and Hotel Maid:

In 1971 someone suggested that I do a series of paintings for reproduction in a desk diary. I decided that I would like to do twelve little paintings - one for each month. I wanted to continue the mediaeval tradition of Books of Hours and Labours of the Months (especially the latter) which were done in manuscripts and so were small; I particularly like works which are small in scale, although not necessarily in concept or implication.

I suppose that in an essentially agrarian culture - the kind Thomas Jefferson thought ideal - it would be easier to come up with images which would be readily recognizable as exemplifying particular months. In our culture certain traditional distinctions between times (even day and night) have become blurred, and so the selection of images for the various months becomes arbitrary.

What seems important is that the idea for a particular month should have the kind of significance for the artist which enables him, one might say propels him, to make an image which is substantial enough, coherent enough, to be received by the viewer as a valid concept of the month even if, to the viewer, that particular image seems at first strange or incongruous. For example, perhaps only I would think of a crow as an emblem of December, of a tractor as expressive of April, but I have to assume that if my images are good enough that they may be accepted as appropriate and may become meaningful. Here we are considering the ambiguous relationship between reality and art; in a culture marked by affectlessness, reality may be introduced into experience by art, and I am inclined to think that the capacity to respond to actual life experience may be heightened by the contemplation of art. For the artist (the producer) art comes out of experience; for the responder to the art experience comes, at least partly, out of art.

At the beginning of this project I decided upon a geometric system which would govern the forms of each of the twelve works and so give them a kind of unity. Such a system establishes intervals, directions, and relationships in space, and is capable of endless variations; the particular one used here is the “circle-in-the-square” system which includes the octagon, certain characteristic angles, the square root of 2 rectangle, and the so-called “sacred cut”.

In the original serigraph, Hotel Maid, which is included in this album, the image was also designed in the circle-in-the-square system, executed in the hand-cut film technique and printed on acid free rag board. As usual, I did all of this myself in my studio.

The subject is related to the twelve facsimiles since it deals with work - or more accurately, in Hannah Arendt’s terms, labour. The idea for this came to me while I was thinking about the activity of folding a blanket by holding the centre section with the chin. All of my works could be described as activities in environments - in this case the environment became one that I associate with repetitive maintenance - a hotel room.

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