Alex Colville's famous work, Church and Horse will be the 15th stamp in the "Masterpieces of Canadian Art" series.

THE ARTIST
David Alexander "Alex" Colville was born in Toronto in 1920, but moved to Amherst, Nova Scotia where at the age of 15 he began to discover his artistic talent under the guidance of Professor Stanley Royle. Crediting Royle with "bringing out the master in him," Colville enrolled in the new Bachelor of Fine Arts program at Mount Allison in 1938. After serving in the armed forces as a war artist, Colville taught fine arts at his old school until 1963. Moving to Wolfville, Nova Scotia in 1972, Colville served as Chancellor of the Humanities Department at Acadia University from 1981 to 1991. As well as becoming a visiting professor at the University of California, Colville designed Centennial coins and the Governor General's medal before being made a companion of the Order of Canada in 1982.

THE PAINTING
Painted in acrylic on hardboard in 1964, Church and Horse is a striking artistic piece that blends natural grace and artistic symmetry, depicting a wild steed galloping to safety through a churchyard to escape dark rainclouds that threaten overhead. Church and Horse now resides in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. When the Art Association of Montreal was founded in 1860 by a wealthy group of art collectors, the museum was part of their plan to establish an art school, a reading room, a library and a permanent collection of sculptures and paintings. After its official opening in 1912, the museum went through a series of upgrades that established it as a world-class institution and now sees over 600,000 visitors a year.

The work of Alex Colville can also be found in collections around the world - including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée D'art Moderne in Paris, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and the Wallraf-Richartz National Museum in Cologne.

THE STAMP
Church and Horse is the latest in the Masterpiece series of stamps that feature works by some of Canada's most influential artists. Designed by Pierre-Yves Pelletier, who worked on previous stamps in the series, the richly-textured design is surrounded by a platinum-foil frame. The first five stamps in this series had silver frames while those of the next five were gold.