Colin McCahon 'Waterfall'
Kriselle Baker
Essays
Posted on 5 August 2025
Colin McCahon has loomed so large within New Zealand art that in the last century, it was difficult to see New Zealand painting beyond his work. This was particularly so for those artists who came of age in the 1960s through the 1980s. The same might be said of the many collectors who have since bought or coveted his work. His imagery sits so heavily within our mental landscape that it is hard to see a range of hills or the thin pathway of a waterfall without thinking of his painting.
Born in 1919, McCahon began producing what is considered his mature paintings while in his late 20s. This work was painted when he was 46 years old, at the height of his career. It was the beginning of his extensive waterfall series.
‘Waterfalls fell and raged and became as still silent falls of light for a long time.’
In A Waterfall (1965), we see a thin vertical rivulet of white cascading down a range of hills in darkness crossed by the light of the setting sun; a forebearer of the many works that followed depicting ‘light falling through a dark landscape.’ The T form shaped by the light and flow of water had earlier also been a tau-shaped cross and later became a ‘load-bearing structure’, key elements that continued to recur in McCahon’s painting.
McCahon had said of these works that they were influenced by the paintings of William Hodges, the official painter with Cook on his second voyage. ‘In 1964, I painted my first waterfall. Hodges is my hero in all these paintings but the Fairy Falls in the Waitakeres....are real influences later’. He had moved to central Auckland from Titirangi some years before beginning this series but continued to hold close the darkness, both real and imagined, of the west coast. And within the density of that darkness, there is, as always, the thunderous text of his word paintings reverberating in the black. His intense engagement and questioning of spirituality floating somewhere beneath the surface.
