Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith
Early Religious Works 1946 - 1952

At first McCahon painted the New Zealand landscape, a genre which was, with portraiture, the dominant motif favoured by the country's artists. Rejecting the academic tradition of the 'scenic vista', McCahon reduced the landscape to its most basic elements and shapes, revealing a view of the country both startlingly new and yet as old as time. As his career progressed his paintings transcended the particulars of location, bringing him closer to his early vision of 'a land of calm, orderly granite'.

In the mid 1940s, McCahon started to populate his landscapes with figures and events drawn from familiar biblical stories, portrayed in the style and surroundings of mid 20th Century rural New Zealand. But he did not do this as an unquestioning believer; on the contrary, he chose a language of well-known stories and symbols – candles, jugs of pure water and oppositions of light and dark – to explore and represent existential human questions and feelings.

Paintings from this period are characterised by heavy contours and a consciously awkward drawing style. McCahon based many of his compositions on reproductions of the classical painters from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Rather than relying solely on colour the paintings are distinguished by an emphasis on modulations of light and dark tones. McCahon also studied the composition and mathematical approach of the 'Golden section'. This idea draws on the use of numbers as an ordering principle and geometric figures to establish proportion and symbolic content. McCahon's approach, which attempted to combine these traditional concepts with modern painting was without precedent or parallel in New Zealand art.

From around 1951 the human figure disappeared from all but a handful of McCahon's paintings (these few exceptions being specific portraits). However, the landscape remained important until the end of his life, either as a subject in itself or as a backdrop for images in which McCahon explored the religious ideas and narratives that expressed his spiritual quest.

His intent largely misunderstood by the audience he was seeking to reach, McCahon's awareness of his need to communicate led, by the end of the 1950s, to his replacement of the figurative image with words.

 

Colin McCAHON
New Zealander 1919–87
Crucifixion: the apple branch 1950
oil on canvas
87.0 x 116.2 cm
Private Collection on loan to the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia
Courtesy of Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, Australia
Reproduced with the permission of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust