Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith
Introduction

Colin McCahon (Timaru 1919–1987 Auckland, New Zealand) is New Zealand's first painter of international significance. Although his career is rooted in a very specific period of New Zealand's history – at a time when the young country was establishing its own national identity independent of Great Britain – many of the issues he deals with are still universally relevant today.

McCahon sought a way to give visual representation to issues of the post-World War II environment. Accessing, appropriating and 'modernising' many aspects of the Western Judaeo-Christian artistic tradition, he developed his painting as a vehicle to discuss these concerns and to communicate them to an audience living in a small, isolated country in the mid 20th Century.

The core of McCahon's oeuvre – his exploration of spiritual belief and knowledge – may seem unfashionable in our secular age. Nevertheless, 'Faith', the theme of this exhibition, is the critical issue in the artist's life and work: faith in God, in man, and in himself as a human being and artist – but also what happens when a person loses faith; the way in which this leads to doubt and despair.

Landscape and religion – more specifically, the spiritual humanist message conveyed by the language of the Christian Bible – are constant factors in the work of McCahon. Although, in the modernist sense, and from the perspective of the Western art world, McCahon's greatest, most original achievements are his paintings from the late 1960s through early 1980s based on texts, mostly drawn from the Bible, and numerals, it does the artist more justice to see him as someone who continues to explore the concerns already found in his earliest works. Therefore the selection of this exhibition has been structured chronologically to make it possible to follow McCahon's development.

McCahon first explored issues of faith in the mid 1940s in paintings in which he placed traditional biblical scenes in contemporary New Zealand settings. From the beginning, he used text in his paintings, words appearing in these works as labels or in cartoon-like speech bubbles explaining the subject. Although for much of the 1950s McCahon was pre-occupied by experiments in painting the landscape, in the radical 1959 Elias series, text supplanted – and even became – the image.

During the 1960s, McCahon's works were often based on generalised landscapes – rarely were they depictions of a specific place. More importantly, the landscape was increasingly employed for its symbolic content. At the start of this decade McCahon had moved from a semi-rural area in surroundings of sub-tropical rainforest to a more urbanised, inner-city locale. The new environment offered new inspirations – roofs of neighbouring factories becoming shifting planes in the Gates series, 1961-62, McCahon's response to the Cold War threat of nuclear holocaust and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Yet, while expressing his environmental concerns, McCahon also used this series to develop his ideas about abstraction, seeking a way to 'break through' the two-dimensional picture plane.

A number of paintings from 1969 onward to 1980 consist solely of words or numerals, depicted against a black or coloured background. Among these are The lark's song 1969, based on a traditional Maori children's game, works from the series Practical religion 1969-70, and Teaching aids 1975, as well as the final paintings of 1980-82, in which McCahon cites texts from A letter to hebrews (New Testament) and Ecclesiastes (Old Testament).
A growing interest in Maori culture and 19th Century Maori responses to Christianity; the symbolism of numbers and the methods used by society to pass knowledge between generations environmental concerns and, finally, the challenge of a loss of faith in one’s beliefs, were all issues addressed by McCahon in the final decade of his career.

A significant feature of McCahon's work during this period is his use of events in his everyday personal life and surrounding environment as the basis of paintings in which, by abstracting the specific, he succeeds in creating more formal images, each imbued with existential – and universal – meaning.

 

Colin McCAHON
New Zealander 1919–87
Six days in Nelson and Canterbury 1950
oil on canvas
88.5 x 116.5 cm
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand
Gift of the artist through the Friends of the Auckland Art Gallery, 1978
Reproduced with the permission of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust