Throughout the early to mid-1950s many of Alex Colville’s paintings featured unclothed women in empty landscapes or bare interiors. Interestingly, the spare settings helped make the figures somehow less exposed, nude rather than naked. In paintings such as Seated Nude (1951) and Nude and Dummy (1950) Colville uses the barest of interiors to create settings that are weighted with import. The attic of Nude and Dummy lacks any furniture or objects of any kind, except for the dressmaker’s dummy of the title. The figure in Seated Nude perches on the edge of a bed covered in a blanket that drapes on the floor. The walls are bare, and no pillows or other covers mar the spare solidity of the bed. The slanted angle of the ceiling in Seated Nude suggests that the figure is situated in the same attic as that of Nude and Dummy, perhaps at the opposite end of the narrow room. Both paintings have a sculptural solidity to them, the figures massive, as if carved out of blocks of stone.
Sources, especially for an artist who draws from such a depth of art historical knowledge and who pares down images to the bare essentials, as Colville does, can be hard to find, and the search is often pointless. How the artist arrived at an image is rarely that important. But it is fascinating to get glimpses into the working methods of an artist such as Colville, because his finished work rarely renders up any clues to his process. We know Colville made numerous preparatory drawings as he developed his compositions, and in Two Nudes we have a sketch that shows evidence of being an early version of both Seated Nude and Nude and Dummy. The figure in the foreground of the drawing sits more comfortably on the bed, but the woman’s posture is identical to the figure in Seated Nude. In the background a figure stands, looking back towards the central figure. This woman has the same pose as the figure in Nude and Dummy, showing how two important early Colville paintings have their origins in a figure study of a pair of women (or two views of the same figure). Colville considered Nude and Dummy his first mature work, highlighting the significance of this study. The background figure becomes the central focus of its own painting, while the seated figure is replaced by the dressmaker’s form and then becomes a painting in its own right. With Colville, it seems, nothing is wasted.
- Ray Cronin, 2023
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