Colin John McCahon (Artist research)
Artist research:
Name: Colin John McCahon
Where are they from and where are they now:
1August 1919 – 27May 1987
prominent New Zealand artist whose work over forty-five years consisted of various styles including: landscape, figuration, abstraction and the overlay of painted text
McCahon is credited with introducing modernism to New Zealand in the mid twentieth century. He is regarded as New Zealand's most important modern artist, particularly in his landscape work.
Born in
Lived in Auckland, Auckland Region, New Zealand
Artwork (for each relevant piece):
1. Name of work: I AM (and other similar/relevant works)
What is it, and what is it made of:
McCahon was caught up in debates about New Zealand national identity. His early works of the mid-1940s are crude renderings of Biblical scenes, often set in identifiable locations
From as early as 1954 with a work like I AM, McCahon started making writing a feature of his pictures. But perhaps the real turning point was Sacred to the Memory of Death of 1955, in which for the first time McCahon writes in his own cursive hand. It gives a direct, autobiographical feel to the work, in which McCahon by periodically loading up and emptying his brush is able to introduce a kind of "breath" into the increasingly long passages from the Bible he started incorporating into his paintings.
Both paintings brilliantly capture aspects of the New Zealand landscape: Practical Religion is set on Mount Martha on the Southern Alps of New Zealand, while the wisp of white paint hovering over the "M" of "I AM" in Victory over Death 2 is the mist invariably seen over mountains in the colloquially described "land of the long white cloud."
In Victory over Death 2, McCahon incorporates words from the following chapters of John, in which the about-to-be-crucified Christ speaks to those assembled, first of His identification with God and then of their identification with Him: "I AM. The crowd standing by said it was thunder, while others said: 'An angel has spoken to him'. Jesus replied: 'This voice spoke for your sake, not mine'."
‘landscape and religion ... are constant factors in his life and work.
Encouraged to think big, the large-scale statement of intent is bursting with the tension between McCahon’s re-acquaintance with the Aotearoa landscape and his recent engagement with the energy of the cosmopolitan centres. He laments the complacency with which the New Zealanders treat their iteration of the promised land: “a landscape with too few lovers”. The Tui’s blacks, blues and greens cry for Northland’s eroded and raw hills.
McCahon had been interested in the shape of words and letters in art since his early childhood
McCahon’s paintings communicate in a powerfully unique way, experimenting with abstractions, laden numerals, epic words and endemic shadows, to form his own brand of new-world modernism. For McCahon it was a wrested struggle for simplicity and power of concept (Here I give thanks to Mondrian). Nothing is more staunchly, ferociously, affirmative than the huge white on black, ‘I AM’ in Victory Over Death 2, (though its doubting reversal, ‘Am I?’ still lurks reflected in the shadows, painted black on black).
Image:
I Am. 1954, oil, 361 x 555 mm
Victory over death
What does it mean/represent:
The art of Colin McCahon is not only about life after death, but about its own afterlife. His work lives on through telling the story of Christ, just as Christ lives on in McCahon's paintings.
More precisely, McCahon found in the great Biblical stories an allegory of their own telling and transmission. The foundational Biblical scene - the scene of religious faith itself - is the story of how the Christian message is transmitted from one to another.
A Question of Faith recognised the central importance of Christian themes for McCahon’s life and art. It was organised around the artist’s spiritual quest, showing how he explored questions of faith and doubt, meaning and despair. ‘My painting is almost entirely autobiographical’, McCahon once wrote, ‘it tells you where I am at any given time, where I am living and the direction I am pointing in.’
McCahon was the artist who gave New Zealand a powerful visual identity. ... That he went further, to explore and communicate through the medium of painting the universal questions and concerns of humanity, is why we, in other parts of the world, must recognise him as a great modern Master.
“McCahon was the artist who gave New Zealand a powerful visual identity and for that he is revered in his homeland.
Working with word and image, McCahon’s pastiche was not painted with the irony of postmodernism, but with the urgency of divining substance.
Connection to culture:
New Zealand culture remained isolated and cut-off into the War and beyond. If not reproductions, then certainly actual works of art from Europe remained scarce. But being cut off from the "originals" produced the strong misreadings and unexpected hybrids that often characterise the art of non-metropolitan cultures.
Hill describes McCahon as a “divine filter”, sucking in everything: influence, environment, the minutiae of existence. Quardle oddle ardle wardle doodle, on the canvas they bled – religion, advertising hoardings, linoleum, redemption, abstract expressionism, Maori symbolism, spirituality and verse, nicotine, guilt, alcohol, architecture, landscape. He turned painting into a graffiti grappling with universal truths and personal experience, an engagement with the edges of life: faith and doubt, choice and agency.
Connection to collonialism:
“New Zealand landscape as a haunted and unheimlich terrain – a treatment of landscape made orthodox by Pakeha (settler descendants) painters such as Colin McCahon.” (Smith, 114)
At some point in the mid-1960s, McCahon settles upon his mature style. It consists of the transcription of Biblical passages set within iconographically suggestive surrounds, which can be seen alternately as the abstraction of some feature of the New Zealand landscape or as simplified Christian symbols.
From his earliest work on, he was setting universal stories - or the closest he could find, namely episodes from the Bible - within the New Zealand landscape. If in one sense they show that the universal happens in New Zealand, in another they reveal that New Zealand is necessarily connected to the universal.
Here (Nelson) he re-engaged with Woollaston, and with a group of young friends at Mapua they launched into ethical and intellectual debates, resolving to find a distinct ‘New Zealand art’ and break free from European traditions.
The promised land – McCahon leading settlers into the contemporary NZ Dunedin, compared to moses. (Prophet)
Critique/response to artwork:
For imagine being great - or even believing you were great - and yet working in faraway New Zealand in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s. Virtually nowhere would condemn you more certainly to being overlooked by the rest of the world - and, moreover, McCahon felt, courtesy of a series of bruising battles with the critics, he was not even appreciated where he lived.
McCahon undoubtedly felt that his own time and place were not yet ready for him, that if he were to be recognised it would have to be at some time in the future. But McCahon did something more than this. Like all truly great artists, he made this situation the very subject of his work.
“Most of my work has been aimed at relating man to man to this world, to an acceptance of the very beautiful and terrible mysteries that we are part of. I aim at very direct statement and ask for a simple and direct response. Any other way the message gets lost.”
Artist further/other work/development:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_McCahon
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/07/25/3553295.htm
http://www.cs.org.nz/magazine/october_08__how_the_light_gets_in/how_the_light_gets_in___the_christian_art_of_colin_mccahon__part_3___the_artist
www.nzedge.com/legends/colin-mccahon/
https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/colin-mccahon-i-am-2004/quotes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHpOURod_p0
What I have learnt:
Can use hand writing for an autobiographical feel
His titles and quotes on the paintings were from the Bible
Make the situation of the critique, the art work: so make the fact that I don’t have a place or a voice my art work. Directly respond to the critique which is what I did last year – in apology. Work called “Ek is nie Jammer nie’ to explain that I don’t have to feel sorry anymore – that I have moved on from it.
Using the Bible quotes to tell his own story
He shows appreciation of the land trough his beautiful landscape paintings
Focus on the importance of words
Stands for the heads – base made out of metal in the shape of the country it is representing with an address on it with vinal sticker as a title.
Write a poem or story about having to change ones identity for different reasons. Be real – Nzer on paper, can get studylink and don’t have to pay international fees. Born with the South African mask and given/developed the others through life. Issue of facing a doctors note – what ethnicity to put down. Does European mean white? European other? Heads presented at the level of age? Heights?
