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Art

Colin McCahon

Jan Walker

Colin McCahon is probably New Zealand's only important painter. This is not to say there are no other good painters in New Zealand, but that McCahon's distinctive style and energy are not related to any known overseas movement—or in fact to few painters from the past or present.

An exhibition of his most recent work is on display at the Peter McLeavey Gallery, Cuba Street. Including the very beautiful "The Canoe Tainui", consisting of eight panels painted especially for this exhibition, McCnhon's work represents another step forward while still stylistically mulling over [unclear: earli] ground.

McCahon has been using words in his pictures since the mid-fifties until a knowledge of graphology has almost become as essential in interpreting McCahon as a knowledge of the power and beauty he sees in words and the formation of words.

The raw material of his ideas are easy enough to isolate and in fact McCahon does this for us. For example, the pictures dealing with Maori themes are personal paintings for Matiu Carr, MeCahon's grandson. The ideas arose from a recently published book written by Matiere Kereama dealing with the genealogy of her people; the people of the canoe Tainui.

The large eight panel painting is a direct quotation from this book reciting the generations of her people, a universal practice among most cultures and amply illustrated by the Bible. I believe that McCahon has to some extent realised that this traditional custom, once recited with pride and honour is becoming an outmoded way of recording historical fact.

No longer will young people have the patience to learn the long beautiful, though often banal, chants, nor has the totem any place in the present. McCahon has replaced the traditional forms with the product of his own invention, has combined the old and the new in a long visual soliloquy.

To attempt this proposition is something which might never have come off if it wasn't for McCahon's strength and tonal mastery. He uses words as building blocks, swimming across his picture in a controlled balance of light and shade. The black Maori mysticism, seen also in the work of Ralph Hotere, is underlain with rich browns and greens swirling in unfathomable depths of time and space.

His heavily mystic quality can also be seen in "For Matui: Muriwai" which arouses the greatest sense of protracted emotion I have seen in his wort for sometime. The yellow streak of dying or awakening sunlight breathes the essence of creation and at the same time there is the heavy mantle of the dying the honour of a race with a history as old as the creation.

It would be impossible to try to identify entirely with McCahon's inspirations and we must get out of his pictures what is in them for each of us individually. His very severity adds greater richness to his work than any amount of decoration. Some parts of "On going out with the tide" might nave benefited from further verbal culling, and each painting in the "Lazarus" scries will clearly need the particular involvement of the viewer to be appreciated.

The bringing of man back from the dead, something twice as amazing and horrifying as landing of man on the moon, has struck McCahon as being a feature of man's, or God's endeavour, almost impossible to dream of.

McCahon's paintings must be approached with caution—neither to be over-awed nor under-impressed. A reputation in some ways limits an artist, as well as viewers and critics, and the essence of McCahon must work from within, be evaluated in the light of honesty and intelligence.