Colin McCahon


Colin McCahon (1919*1987) is now widely regarded as New Zealand's most important modern painter. He wrote extensively about his painting and in some of his notes made it quite clear that he did not subscribe to the formalist purity of non-figurative abstraction. Mostly McCahon was self-taught--- a fact that freed him to some extent from the style and approaches of the art schools. His painting was never conceived as an elitist form of high art or culture.

McCahon was preoccupied with religious and moral issues. His art dealt with Christian themes either in the form of religious subjects of the 1940s, or in texts taken from the Bible. McCahon is often concerned with black and white, both of tone and of a symbolical scale between good and evil. He frequently places religious events in the New Zealand landscape. For McCahon landscape remains a constant reference throughout his painting career.

McCahon's landscape is regional, but he strips it back to its geological essentials. Among Colin McCahon's earliest works are landscapes of the Dunedin and Otago Peninsula districts. His large Otago Peninsula painting of 1939 Harbour Cone from Peggy's Hill showed the whole peninsula as if from above and has reduced the volcanic cone forms to bare unadorned shapes. By using outline, he is able to generate a degree of distortion expression into what could have been a bland image. The reduced colour in this painting already reveals McCahon's sympathy for a monochrome palette.

n the years 1946 to 1952 McCahon peopled his empty New Zealand landscape with biblical figures. The works are painted in a consciously Naive style using heavy black outlines, hand-painted text and simplified landforms and figures. Often the figures are supported by texts inscribed in the picture. McCahon was trying to make sense of the religious story for the audience by setting it in a New Zealand context.

McCahon expressed his concerns and ideas through signs, symbols and motifs which became progressively simplified, yet more complex in meaning, as his work developed. McCahon was using the typical landforms, to communicate a Christian view of the world: a view in which doubt, sin and guilt play a major part. McCahon's overtly religious subjects of the late 1940s are almost unique in New Zealand painting. A feature of these paintings is their abrasive, primitivist style of conception and execution. Clearly among McCahon’s sources were the great religious paintings of the Italians from Cimabue through to Titian. These are painted with crude, black outlining, the figures are awkward and lacking in standard qualities of anatomy. McCahon attempted to relate the biblical message to New Zealand. By introducing balloon speech, as in The King of the Jews, 1947, or using symbols like a kerosene lamp of the sort commonly to be found in rural areas at the time.

During the 1940s McCahon evolved his kind of regional landscape, Takaha Night and Day 1948, and Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury, 1950. These focus on typical landforms of specific regions, but the images appear not merely depopulated but of an era before the advent of people. They have a primal simplicity and bareness made more stark by the use of light and darkness as visual metaphors for spiritual values. The significance of these images lies in the raising of issues concerning values like good and evil, truth and falsehood or the purpose of life. McCahon views the landscape as essentially spiritual.

About 1954, McCahon became interested in Cubism and applied some of the techniques such as fragmentation of form, passage and transparent planes to the treatment of his new subjects drawn from Titirangi. Also, about this time, his first paintings using words as the main imagery begin to appear. By making the words solid, like real three-dimensional forms projected in a shallow space, McCahon applied in part of Cubism’s principles, and in part his recollections of sign-writing of words painted onto the windows of store she had seen in his youth.

McCahon's visit to the US had a significant effect on how he conceived his painting afterwards. His major works on returning were series like The Northland Panels, 1958, and The Wake, 1958. These paintings are on pieces of unstretched canvas arranged like wall paintings side by side along the room or gallery. The imagery is landscape based but is handled with a greater degree of abstraction. Through these paintings McCahon showed his skill to absorb fresh ideas from US, yet was able to relate them to what he had been doing previously.

McCahon had seen a retrospective of Mondrian's work in 1958. His geometric abstraction consisted of dramatically simplified geometric blocks of primary colour. He sought to go beyond external appearances to the underlying essence of things, reduced elements to bare essentials.

During the 1960s McCahon built on his new breadth of experience to create important series of paintings, some austere in abstraction and colour like the Gate Series, some based on the use of numerals and words, others are pure landscape. The word paintings such as The Lark's Song, 1969, consisted of words drawn in paint on a dark ground. The writing is deliberately free of artifice. His choice of Maori verse (from Matire Kereama's poem) typifies his preference to quote rather than write his own words; and he introduces a bi-cultural dimension to the image.

In the seventies McCahon continued to evolve his painting with surprising boldness and inventiveness. His later works are paintings organized by the use of numbers. For example, Teaching Aids 2, 1975, this work is stark and reductive in colour and tone. Through such arrangements, he can set up sequences, arrange emphases, suggest variable readings and possibilities without need of traditional composition or spatial order. He achieves a radical, fresh and layered presentation, rich in symbolic meanings.





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