David Eggleton
Towards a Promised Land: On the life and art of Colin McCahon, by Gordon H. Brown (Auckland University Press, 2010) hardback, colour plates and illustrations, 216 pp., $79.99
Evangelism takes strange forms. Arthur Stace, a former alcoholic who became a Christian, spent thirty-seven years chalking the word ‘Eternity’ in beautiful copperplate onto the pavements of Sydney before his death in 1967. Toss Woollaston’s uncle, Frank, was another eccentric evangelist. One of the illustrations in Gordon H. Brown’s
Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon is of Colin McCahon’s ‘A Painting for Uncle Frank’, a late work (1980) containing (written in white paint over a black background) a quotation from the New English Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes, which includes the words ‘Those who refuse to hear the oracle speaking on earth find no escape.’ McCahon met Uncle Frank a number of times during the late 1930s and early 1940s at Toss Woollaston’s house in Motueka, and was fascinated by Uncle Frank’s ‘teaching aids’: his naïve paintings of simple Christian symbols, part of his itinerant preaching paraphernalia which he insisted on pinning to the walls of Toss Woollaston’s home whenever he was visiting, much to his nephew’s irritation.
Uncle Frank’s visual texts, as Brown outlines, were just one influence on McCahon’s complex build-up to the 1954 creation of his first distinctive all-word paintings. There was also the example of speech balloons in cartoons, comics and advertising (most famously the lettering encased in a bubble shape on the Rinso soap flakes packet). And Brown quotes McCahon’s childhood visual epiphany of a commercial signwriter at work on the words HAIRDRESSER & TOBACCONIST on a shop window: ‘Painted gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold with shadows … I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting.’
Other origins of the use of painted words Brown points to include: the inscriptions on the headstones in cemeteries; the vernacular of hand-painted signs outside fruit and vege shops; the nineteenth-century convention of inscribing the title (which with McCahon has grown to fill the whole painting) on the finished canvas; the painted initial letters on illuminated medieval manuscripts; and the use of texts in religious art by Fra Angelico and the other early Italian Renaissance painters of the Quattrocento. A key reference for McCahon was John Pope-Hennesey’s 1947 Phaidon book Sienese Quattrocento Painting, bought by McCahon soon after it was published. McCahon’s other crucial books were the King James Bible — later replaced by the New English Bible, with its use of plain, modern speech — and the copy of Charles A. Cotton’s Geomorphology of New Zealand that was given to him and his wife Ann as a wedding present in 1942 — a book which, as Brown tells us, offered for McCahon not the ‘revelation’ of hitherto unknown geology, but ‘clarification’ of what the landscape’s surface features were. Painting was not an ‘aesthetic exercise’ but a matter of ‘feeling’ — of depicting a landscape ‘with too few lovers’.
Educated at Otago Boys’ High School, which he later referred to as ‘a school for the unseeing’, McCahon fled formal education in order to follow a self-ordained career as a prophet and visionary (while earning his daily bread as a fruitpicker, gardener and manual labourer). Learning from Woollaston, he became a primitivist painter in the 1930s (and thereby part of a primitivist movement: Australia had Sydney Nolan and Arthur Boyd). What mattered was authenticity: the landscape drawing, for example, made by dipping a stalk of grass in ink, then smudging in shadows with fingertips. Inspired early on by the English craftsman-artist Eric Gill, McCahon considered himself a proletarian artist, a humble worker whose imagery derived from everyday objects turned into religious symbols: the water jug, the wooden table, the kerosene lamp.
McCahon’s sense of higher purpose manifested itself in affirmative paintings such as 1948’s ‘The Promised Land’ (oil on canvas), but that optimism was in conflict with his slowly developing scepticism, doubt and gloominess which led, circuitously but eventually, to the follow-up 1962 painting ‘Was this the promised land?’ (commercial oil-based paint on hardboard) — complete with lack of capitalisation. Significantly, this latter work is not in Brown’s book, though it is reproduced in Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, by Marja Bloem and Martin Browne (Craig Potton Publishing and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2002), a book that Brown has a quarrel with, because in it Bloem argues that McCahon gave up painting several years before he died, after he had lost his religious beliefs and therefore his artistic faith. Brown disagrees quite vehemently, arguing his decision to give up painting was primarily a result of physical debility, to which Brown was a witness.
Brown’s book charts the zigzags and contradictions of Colin McCahon (1919—1987) as hillbilly primitivist, as Christian believer bedevilled by doubt, as heroic solitary amidst dark bulwarks and looming obelisks, and finally as emblematic High Modernist, whose great didactic blackboards of paintings, having attained sacerdotal status, have been winched and hoisted high to dominate the panoramic narrative of mid-twentieth century New Zealand art.
But Towards a Promised Land is not a carefully structured chronological narrative, instead it is a heterogeneous assemblage of seventeen essays derived from previously published catalogue texts, occasional lectures, gallery floor talks and shorter essays which he has revised, reworked, added to. Consequently, there is some repetition: the story of McCahon’s encounter with Uncle Frank, for example, is mentioned several times, each time in a slightly different context, so that the repetitions have the effect of reinforcing the notion of these essays as estimates and attempts to get the artist in focus, placing us over and over again in the vicinity of oft-told anecdotes, quotes and the famous images, as if zooming close and veering away, then sidling up again obliquely to aspects and facets.
We learn of McCahon’s early infatuation with theatre, of how he worked, surprisingly, as a vaudeville comedian for Fred Argyles’ Variety Company in 1938, ahead of his involvement with designing theatrical sets for play productions, including the James K. Baxter Festival of plays held in Wellington in 1973. Brown informs us of McCahon’s late-developing alcoholism, as well as his life-long struggle to establish a private studio in which to paint, something he did not get until he was able to afford an industrial shed set up on a property owned by his wife on the coast at Muriwai in 1969. Yet though this gossip is intermittently revealing, Brown’s forte is not so much the empathetic flair of the biographer, rather it’s his pursuit of the thematic threads in what remains to many a rather forbidding body of work.
In his essay ‘To keep back beauty from vanishing away’, Brown explores just how essential a term ‘beauty’ was in McCahon’s personal lexicon. It was the depth of feeling implied by this word that ‘led to an eschatological framework within which he could situate references to Christ and Elias, Te Whiti and Rua Kenana, Titian, Braque, Gris, Michelangelo and Mondrian.’ McCahon was a subtle, brilliant colourist whose brief stints overseas (Australia, the USA) only strengthened his sense of local light.
Brown also argues that New Zealand becomes in McCahon’s paintings more of ‘an environment’ or collection of environments, rather than a set of specific places, and in turn each environment becomes a setting wherein: ‘Christ’s crucifixion is re-enacted, a bridge is built, a plane flies high above the Manukau Harbour; in Canterbury John listens in the dark; birds seek safety in the crevices of vertical cliffs; the hesitant are made to jump; the Shining Cuckoo comes to rest on a sandbank; the child looking at a blackboard learns about the lessons of life; the comet Kohoutek crosses the night sky.’
If Brown’s personal relationship with McCahon as an unswerving supporter is a main reference point, so too is James K. Baxter’s relationship, symbolically bookended here by two major paintings. First, 1947’s ‘A Candle in a Dark Room’ — with its implication that Baxter was a prophet and visionary like McCahon himself (it was painted to mark McCahon’s first meeting with Baxter); and second, ‘Walk’ (1973), painted just after Baxter’s death, in which McCahon imagines himself walking the length of Muriwai beach in the company of the disputatious bard, reconciled with him. (They had fallen out a few years previously, after Baxter attacked McCahon for taking a salaried job at Elam School of Art, thereby seeming to abdicate his role as a prophet in the wilderness, as a Jeremiah, as a ‘cell of good living’.
McCahon, Brown states, always refused to have a television in his home, believing it to be ‘a conveyor of corrupting images’. Consequently, when McCahon succumbed to the ‘ill effects … of years of boozing’ in the early 1980s, and sat slumped in front of a TV set, surrendered to its flickering cave of shadows, it registers with Brown as symbolic of the fact that McCahon had stopped making art. Finally, Brown ponders McCahon’s last painting ‘I consider the acts of oppression’, probably produced in 1980, but neither signed nor dated, and Brown’s exegesis, that pondering becomes a series of questions, a series of readings, a series of possible sightings — as if he has been staring hard into its black and bitter depths of ambiguity.
DAVID EGGLETON is the Editor of Landfall Review Online.
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