There is only One Direction...

LUIT BIERINGA

Reading the fine appreciation of McCahon's work by Wystan Curnow in the Necessary Protection exhibition catalogue as well as the incredible experience of seeing the exhibition gradually unroll itself on to the walls of the Manawatu Art Gallery left me with little energy, or even desire, to verbalise my profound appreciation of Colin's work during that period of exploration and self-appraisal of the 'forties, when those friends who were close and receptive to the artist's intentions witnessed the evolution of ideas and formal techniques which formed the basis of the major achievements in subsequent years. The cross references (in time and place) between what we are able to see today and the early works of the 'forties abound, and with each new work created, one's understanding of the antecedents is broadened and enriched.

Many of us away from the main centres where McCahon's work is exhibited on a regular basis do not have the opportunity to establish a continuous dialogue with the artist's work, and a sudden confrontation with works like Red and Black can leave one momentarily stunned, and Am I Scared may be the only suitable end-piece in such a situation . . . scared perhaps at one's inability to face a simple truth which cuts too deeply.

Faced with works which allow no compromises - (as Wystan Curnow has written in the Necessary Protection catalogue: 'McCahon is an artist of apocalypse, of crisis. He forces the issue'.) - we do require a period of reacquaintance or familiarisation to overcome this confrontation within ourselves and with the responses we might make. Commitment to an ideal or personal vision in the face of society's restrictions is never too easy to contemplate and we adopt a variety of easily assimilated disguises to avoid it. How much more faith is needed on the part of the artist who exposes himself to all and sundry through his work in this act of communication.

Those who have experienced McCahon's work over a period of time will readily perceive the interconnections in the bodies of work, and appreciate the choice confronting the painter; between the making of very personal painting and the need to communicate, a problem of choice which occasioned many a doubt. Perhaps the problems of communication which confront the artist are not so much his as ours; the repertoire of images, symbols and formal technique is abundantly clear and consistent.

In our supposedly literate community we can all read, yet do we understand or want to understand what are essentially familiar symbols? Just as we can all talk yet seldom say anything - to communicate. Amidst the superficial complexities of our lives we ignore, or have lost the ability to recognize the simplicities strewn across our path - are we too scared to face them and consequently escape 'among trivial diversions? It is not surprising, therefore, to perceive the irony inherent in the situation when, as Anthony Green has pointed out, 'the more you speak the plain human truth the less you reach the common man'; in that lies the pity, for all the part failures and successes in the artist's trials, communication on a broad scale has often proven a one-way passage, yet the works exist and time will wear away the edges of incomprehension and allow hope to exist. Communication is a serious business and the gravity and authority of McCahon's work underline this fact.

Colin McCahon's earliest cohesive statement on the charting of this country, his Otago Peninsula, 1939, acts as a pointer to the works to follow; just as the geometrical simplification of Cotton's drawings in his Geomorphology of New Zealand appealed to Colin's sense of structural clarity of the land devoid of any ornamental elaboration, so did the intimate acquaintance with the Otago landscape reveal its timeless order and beauty, something 'not yet understood or communicated' to its people. At various stages of the artist's work we are aware of the intimate and growing acquaintance with the landscape he inhabits at any given time. After Otago the viewer was introduced to Nelson which was to provide the physical environment for his early religious works of the 'forties. In the Necessary Protection paintings we walk along with the artist at Muriwai.

During a time, at the beginning of the war, when doubt was as strong as conviction, McCahon's letters indicate a deepening interest in Christian art which was as much a consequence of his discussions on the subject with Toss Woollaston and the presence of revivalist groups in the Nelson area as a reaction to the ugliness of war and man's lack of faith and therefore inability to stop it. Christian art, the Crucifixion and other stations of the Passion in particular, also provided a means whereby the artist could people his landscape to 'soften' it. The drawings of figures during the early 'forties hint at this desire; to reason out the existence of people in the landscape, an existence which had diminished since the early colonial paintings in direct relation to the populating of the land. The reasons for re-peopling the landscape were profound (as the late Charles Brasch indicated in 1950), the reaffirmation of man's place in the world through the story of the Passion.

Nineteen-forty-three; confronting and battling his own doubts, in the midst of a landscape which insulated its inhabitants from the physical reality of war, McCahon hinted at the possible shedding of light in a small work titled, A Candle in a Dark Room. An earlier drawing from 1940, Peninsular Landscape with Lamp, also intimated the introduction of symbols more fully evolved during the late 'forties. While the identification with the 'new' Nelson landscape gradually grew stronger, doubts about his attitude towards his work, and the means of communication lessened. Perhaps Spring, Ruby Bay, 1945, can best be used to illustrate a newly-found confidence which led to the making of a 'family' of works underpinning later developments. Without abandoning the simplicity and order found in his earlier landscapes, McCahon commenced to people his Nelson figure-grounds with the images and faces of his neighbours, of people like Majorie Naylor, who as Marge, is the prototype of the early Maries; from 'Marge' to 'Marge as the Virgin Mary' to 'The Virgin Mary', sketched within the bare bones of a Nelson hillside or valley, they contained the surface setting for the re-enactment of the Passion, austere and prophetic.

The enthusiasm springing from the resolution of many of his doubts was reinforced by the 'wonderful gift' of the Phaidon publications at that time. Titian, Michelangelo and Gauguin were revealed, while later Fra Angelico, the Sienese painters, Signorelli and Memling were consulted and admired as much for their stylistic and symbolic riches as for a confirmation of his own beliefs about Christian art. Reinforcing the simplicity and pictorial order of his landscapes, as Anthony Green noted (in volume 3, Bulletin of New Zealand Art History), 'he selected from the old masters a system of contrasts of light and dark, clarity of narrative elements and a reduction of linear possibilities to simple curves and straight lines'. Marge as the Virgin Mary at Maitai Valley, 1946, illustrates his sources and intentions most poignantly, for the simple horizontal line, contrasting with the grief-laden curve of Marge's figure, is a contrast constantly emerging in the many religious works of the next six years.

Early in 1947, an abundantly productive year, Colin painted one of his most successful and convincing works of that period, The King of the Jews. This work, more than any other, provided solutions which gave the artist the strength and freedom to explore other possibilities: it proved as much a gateway then as the Northland Panels of 1958 proved a breakthrough for the painter's subsequent journeys. In it are concentrated those symbolic and formal inventions which the artist was to employ in his work from then on - light (symbolic of the Resurrection) versus darkness, the straight lines of the T-shaped cross versus the curved lines of the figures, the chalice representing the sacrifice of Christ and a symbol of faith. McCahon's own journey till then points to the sources: the Madonna is the oft-depicted Marge, the precursor of the legend on white is an amalgam of the Rinso packet balloon, the earlier 'labelling' in I Paul to You at Ngatimote and the inscribed title of Spring, Ruby Bay.

In a letter written in 1947 McCahon specifically mentioned the employment of words: 'The use of legend with space composition could be very telling'. Such a formal invention which, in a broader sense, was indeed telling, as the public reaction to it, and other works, occasioned in the 1948 Wellington exhibition evidenced. Few, apart from those aware of the reason for such formal innovations could hide their antagonism and outrage at these 'unfamiliar' images which defied their expectations. For some, the 1975 McCahon 'Religious' Works exhibition, which included the same works, occasioned a similar reaction to that of nearly three decades earlier. Anthony Green, in an analysis of Curnow's notes on a 1963 lecture by McCahon in the Bulletin previously referred to, has pointed out that the problems of McCahon's 'formal presentation was the reason without doubt for the antagonism to the paintings when they were exhibited in Wellington. The figure drawing, the modelling, the brushwork, the cartoonist's word bubbles and the inscriptions all avoid traditional expectations of art, as if to place the pictures outside the category of Art altogether. But no such an escape from the medium is possible. All these formal features still remain bound up with the subject. They are also the foundation for his subsequent freedoms with formal and technical means'.

The artist's stay at Tahunanui, near Nelson, during 1947 and 1948 was to be one of the most productive of his early periods and saw the making of what may be loosely termed a series of works, in that, as yet, no orderly progression along the fourteen stations of the Passion, although inherent, was formulated. Entombments, Annunciations, the Madonna and Child, enigmatic works like Christ as a Lamp and The Valley of Dry Bones are depicted, while throughout the central theme of the Passion, the Crucifixion provides the pivot about which the artist's, and man's, journey unfolds. Only in the later Drawings for Charles Brasch, 1952, do we find, for the first time, a clear, ordered approach to Christ's Passion with several of the drawings related, or alluding, to specific stations of the Cross.

Throughout the journey Colin McCahon transcribes, which sets the Passion in this land, he developed an iconography and formal vocabulary to supplement, and reinforce, a language which might adequately carry the moral and spiritual concepts of his beliefs. Many of the works he painted failed to meet the stringent demands he set himself; some were not simple enough; however, others like the early King of the Jews, the later Brasch drawings and the poignant Mary and Jesus in There is Only One Direction indicate his achievements and the promise of works we have been fortunate enough to experience since then.