Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith
Walks and Jumps

Between 1971 and 1973 several people important and close to McCahon died, in particular the poet James K. Baxter and McCahon's mother, Ethel. The artist turned again to the Muriwai environment for inspiration, finding it in the beach's association with the traditional Maori spirit path to 'Te Rerenga Wairua', the 'jumping off' point for departing souls on their journey to the spirit world.

McCahon's exploration of these ideas culminated in the three Walk. Beach Walk paintings of mid 1973 and The Shining Cuckoo of 1974. Returning to a landscape analogy of the Via Dolorosa by numbering each of the panels with the numbers of the Stations of the Cross, McCahon overlaid the image of Christ's last journey with the Maori tradition of the spirit's path, while grounding a 'painting to walk past' in the tides, mists, weather patterns and moods of a landscape he loved:

People should know perhaps that I don't regard these canvases as ''paintings'', they shouldn't be enclosed in frames, they are just bits of a place I love and painted in memory of a friend who now – in spirit – has walked this same beach. The intention is not realistic but an abstraction of the final walk up the beach. The Christian ''walk'' and the Maori ''walk'' have a lot in common.
McCahon, 1973

In late 1973, the return of the gannets to the nesting colony at Moturoa Island precipitated a new series of works inspired by events in nature. In Jump 1974, McCahon explores the need for all creatures to make choices, taking risks in order to grow. McCahon understood that the very landscape features which had previously offered the gannets protection were now impediments to be overcome if the birds were to learn to fly. In the first hesitant attempts at flight from the rocky cliffs’ outcrop there was no room for a loss of confidence, nor for error or failure.

 

Colin McCAHON
New Zealander 1919–87
The shining cuckoo 1974
synthetic polymer paint on canvas (5 panels)
177.0 x 451.4 cm (overall)
Hocken Library, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
Gift of the artist
Reproduced with the permission of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust