In his painting Coastal Figure (1951) Alex Colville integrated his model into the landscape, enclosing the woman in a tight box. This served to make her size completely ambiguous. If the figure was to stand up, she could be human sized or vastly tall, there are no visual cues – beyond our own expectations that an image conform to reality – to give us any clue as to the scale of this figure. A more romantic artist might have titled such a work “Giantess Contemplating the Sea” and we would immediately see the figure as enormous in the landscape. She is, quite simply, monumental.
Colville’s concerns here are sculptural, that is, they are about how the body exists in space. His use of a reclining figure quotes both classical art history and is a nod to a contemporary artist of great renown in the early 1950s. No artist of the 20th century spent more time thinking about how a reclining figure could achieve a monumental scale in the landscape than did Henry Moore. The relationship of figure to landscape was one that Moore mostly worked out in three dimensions, in actual rather than imagined space. But in several drawings and etchings throughout his career he made images of reclining figures in the sort of pastoral landscapes of rolling hills that he imagined as the setting for his monumental sculptures. However abstract his figures became, these drawings attest that they are always figures. But they are also of the earth. As one contemporary art historian has written, “Moore’s works are as solid and as stable as landscape.”[1]
So too, of course, are Colville’s, and in this beautiful study we see how Colville was working out that solidity, monumentalizing an anonymous figure so that it almost becomes the land, a physical embodiment of the coast.
Add a comment