Ben Plumbly on Colin McCahon 'Waterfall'

Ben Plumbly on Colin McCahon 'Waterfall'

Featured in Important Paintings & Contemporary Art | Tuesday 15 August

Lucid, bold, simple and accessible. Not necessarily the usual adjectives one might associate with the work of Colin McCahon. But here they stand in this 1964 Waterfall painting in glorious abundance. From the collection of fellow artist and friend Molly Macalister, who originally owned this work before passing it down through her family. McCahon wrote of Molly Macaliister, for her memorial service in 1979: “Molly gave us our Bird Watcher who sits in the garden and watches birds on our grapefruit tree and a privet. She never looks down. She is a calm and detached figure who watches beyond the birds and the trees to something even more rewarding. It could be the sunset or rainbows lacing a passing storm or the world of clouds that hang heavily in the Auckland sky most times - a feeling of peace.”

The vast majority of works from this series were painted in 1964 and exhibited soon after at Auckland’s Ikon Gallery, including this example. The paintings sold surprisingly well, causing an elated McCahon to remark: “For the first time ever have had a near sell out with my exhibition and it’s about the toughest I’ve done yet.” ‘Tough’ seems a strange choice of word, as these predominantly small paintings have long appeared as among McCahon’s most accessible and undemanding. As Peter Simpson has noted, McCahon could mean here that what was ‘tough’ was discovering a motif and means of expression that could mediate between popular taste and his own painterly concerns. A fine line which he often found difficult to negotiate.

Some ten years on from his move to Auckland to take up a position at Auckland Art Gallery, McCahon was still taking direct inspiration from Auckland’s beautiful West Coast. Here the inspiration lay in a trip to the Fairy Falls, deep in the Waitākere Ranges and today inaccessible due to the proliferation of kauri dieback and the Rahui. McCahon would remark: “The waterfalls started flowing in 1964 and there were hundreds of them. They grew out of William Hodges’ paintings on loan to the Auckland City Art Gallery from The Admiralty, London... Hodges is my hero in all these paintings but the Fairy Falls in the Waitakares and Japanese and Chinese painting are the real influences later... Waterfalls fell and raged and became still as silent falls of light for a long time. I look back with joy on taking a brush of white paint and curving through the darkness with a line of white”.

McCahon’s claim that there were ‘hundreds of them’ seems a vast exaggeration as, despite the series being among the artist’s largest numerically, the McCahon database lists 75 works in the series. This example is especially memorable due to the economy of means and production, a simple swathe of white scything through a dark field. Like the best of McCahon’s painting it is both simple and timeless, matter of fact but rich in spiritual resonance, with his surfaces encapsulating the texture and essence of the landscape in a manner that no photograph could capture.

With McCahon, as always, his ‘Waterfalls’ represent landscapes of the heart. The artist long repudiated the Western or Pākehā landscape tradition, his deep connection to the land, especially Auckland’s West Coast, sharing much more with the Māori notion of Whenua. Whenua is the Māori word for both placenta and land. For McCahon, as for Māori, it is the source that provides sustenance for life itself.

Ben Plumbly