Taking his subjects from his surroundings, the Maritime-based artist Alex Colville (1920–2013) returned to similar themes throughout his seventy-year career: family life, desire, individual will, and relationships between men and women, humans and animals, nature and the machine. He was intent on creating a world of order from the reality of chaos, always aware of the essential and tragic fragility of this Sisyphean task. Colville’s paintings are distinctive and easily recognizable, marked by his careful, unified brushwork and meticulously arranged compositional structures. For more on Alex Colville read Ray Cronin’s Alex Colville: Life & Work.
Ray Cronin is a Nova Scotia–based writer and curator. A former director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, he is the founding curator of the Sobey Art Award and the author of Mary Pratt: Still Light (2018) and Our Maud: The Life, Art and Legacy of Maud Lewis (2017).
The 2023 Canadian Art Inspiration 
The 2022 Canadian Art Inspiration 
Autumn Tigers
The 2021 Canadian Art Inspiration
Mastery in Metal
Through the Lens of C.D. Hoy
The Measure of Nature: 
Artist and Abolitionist
Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds
Early Snow: Michael Snow 1947-1962
Harold Town: Art of Evolution
William Kurelek’s Art of Rapture and Reminiscence
Prudence Heward’s Modern Women
Paul-Émile Borduas’s Abstract Revolution
Norval Morrisseau’s Spiritual Vision
Shared History: The Drawings of Pitseolak Ashoona
Art of Perception: Jack Chambers’s Inner Vision
Personal, Local, and National: Greg Curnoe’s Vision
Zacharie Vincent’s Indigenous Legacy