“Hotel Maid” (hand printed colour serigraph, signed, titled, dated 1978 and numbered 23/75 in the lower margin, subject 9.5 ins x 7.75 ins, unframed); “January”, “February”, “March”, “April”, “May”, “June”, “July”, “August”, “September”, “October”, “November”, and “December” (twelve colour photolithographs, each sheet 13 ins x 11 ins and matted); contained within the original portfolio with title page and three pages of text (the third signed and numbered 23/75 by the artist); published by Fischer Fine Art Limited, London, in association with Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto
In this portfolio project, Colville continues the medieval tradition of the “Book of Hours, Labours of the Months,” defining and representing routine tasks of each respective month. In a traditionally agrarian culture, the livelihood of society was deeply rooted in the cyclical seasons and the responsibilities devoted to tending the land throughout the calendar year.
The artist's process also plays a key role in deconstructing the significance of the project. Geometry plays and integral role with the artist employing the “circle-in-the-square” and “sacred cut” to give the works unity with regards to the relation of space and composition, as a grouping. The ancient principles of architecture and geometry also gives nod to Colville's goal of highlighting the significance of details in the everyday, of giving weight to seemingly small details of daily tasks or labours. The artist's process and devotion to ancient principles of construction then becomes a labour in and of itself.
The importance of the activities being accomplished within the respective seasonal environments also highlights how the environment becomes a place of constant maintenance – a labour. In this series, it is not necessarily the traditional labours such as tending crops or tilling the land, though these are depicted, but rather the daily idiosyncrasies of life and the behavioural changes linked to the months and seasons of the year. The first thaw of March and bringing of new life in the surrounding natural environment, basking in the first warm summer sun in May, serenely gazing from an open window in August, taking in the last of summer before the season turns to cooler weather. Much of what concerns Colville is the human condition within the landscape and one's relation to their environment. In this work, the artist's signature preoccupation with and talent of capturing intimate moments in atmospheric landscapes is accomplished.
The artist explains in the accompanying opening text within the portfolio: “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 be accepted as appropriate and may become meaningful.”
