Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith
Landscapes, Numbers and Stations

A Landscape is an ever recurring theme in my painting and even when the landscape is not directly stated as such it has been implied both in form and light... Now the place is not stated… Certainly the landscape is New Zealand but in an amalgam of both North and South. Nor is this the tourist's landscape… I am dealing with the essential monotony of this land, with variations on a formal theme... a ''landscape with too few lovers''...
McCahon ,1963

At the end of 1963 McCahon painted smaller re-statements of a curved hill motif he had developed the preceding year. These works are the genesis of McCahon's next major series, the Waterfalls 1964. ‘The waterfalls started flowing in 1964… They grew out of William Hodges' paintings on loan to the Auckland City Art Gallery from the Admiralty, London… Hodges is my hero in all these paintings but the Fairy Falls in the Waitakeres and Japanese and Chinese painting are the real influences later… I look back with joy on taking a brush of white paint and curving through the darkness with a line of white.’ (McCahon, 1972).

In early 1965 McCahon returned to an examination of the theme of numbers, a subject he had first explored at the end of the 1950s. He was well aware that many of the teachings of the Christian Church are based on the symbolic meaning of numbers. 'The large Numerals series... took months to paint and developed very slowly. They work as a painting and as an environment. They are where we are in one way; and, in another way, if we could walk on from 10 where would we get to. I worked out many new formal problems here and in the paintings following them… Numbers do say a hell of a lot. They mark a time and a place...' (McCahon, 1972).

The Fourteen Stations of the Cross 1966, depicts a series of simplified, generalised landscapes – one for each of the events which took place on Christ's route to Calvary. With The Fourteen Stations of the Cross 1966, McCahon's abstracted landscape vision becomes even more sparse. No longer dependent on the curved hill line, each of the Station's landscapes has been simplified to a banded motif of sky, hill and plain, with, in each, a simple line hinting at a cleft, road, fold or waterfall. 'Each one of the series is numbered and inscribed with its traditional caption. This series is closely related in feeling to the Numerals 1965, and some of the Waterfalls 1964, as well as to many other paintings... They are all concerned with Man's fall and his resurrection. They also relate to the Elias subject… I am saying what I want to say in these paintings but I am still too abstract.' (McCahon, 1972)

In the North Otago landscapes of the following two years, even the marks of landscape features are absent. It is now just a trinity of sky, hill and plain. 'These landscapes all derive from the earlier Stations of the Cross 1966, and from my own long association with this most beautiful landscape, both as a child and also later...' (McCahon, 1972).

 

Colin McCAHON
New Zealander 1919–87
Waterfall (one panel from a polytych) 1964
enamel paint on plywood
212.7 x 90.5 cm
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Auckland, New Zealand
Purchased, 1967
Reproduced with the permission of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust