Peter Simpson on Colin McCahon 'The Testimony of Scripture No. 2'

Peter Simpson on Colin McCahon 'The Testimony of Scripture No.2'

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In 1972 it was suggested to Colin McCahon by a Wellington friend, Dr. Ian Prior, that he make a painting based on the eleventh chapter of A Letter to Hebrews (so called in The New English Bible, McCahon’s habitual source of Biblical texts from 1969). This chapter is, broadly speaking, ‘a call to faith’ (a subtitle used in the NEB) – an exhortation to Christians to be staunch in the face of persecution. However, it was not until 1979, seven years later, that McCahon finally got around to taking up the suggestion; indeed, over the six months between September 1979 and February 1980 he produced a remarkable cluster of works incorporating texts from the Letter. Traditionally attributed to St Paul, A Letter to Hebrews is now thought by most biblical scholars to have been written by a follower rather than the apostle himself. McCahon, however, assumed St Paul’s authorship. He told Toss Woollaston:

‘I’ve been rediscovering St Paul & he bowls me over – the letters to Hebrews – they have me in their grip & power & clear honesty. What a guy and what a real message’

(quoted in Simpson, Colin McCahon: Is This the Promise Land?, AUP, 2020, p. 317).

McCahon began the group by inscribing the first 40 verses of Hebrews 11 onto six sheets of Steinbach paper. This work, A Letter to Hebrews (Rain in Northland), a densely textual series (with minimal landscape elements) comprising collectively around 1000 words, is now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. He then turned to a large work on unstretched canvas, A Letter to Hebrews, which he described to Peter McLeavey as ‘an elephant size job’; comprising the first 16 verses of Hebrews surrounding a large Tau cross, it was eventually gifted to Te Papa MONZ by Prior and his family. McCahon told McLeavey: ‘Another is coming on – smaller – all on Hebrews’ (Ibid,). These words almost certainly refer to three acrylics on paper, The Testimony of Scripture No.s 1, 2 and 3, dated, like the large work on canvas, October 1970. Whether these constitute a single three-part work (like the contemporaneous A Song to Rua: Prophet and Imprisonment and Reprieve) or three separate works with the same title is debatable, though they were certainly broken up and sold separately, unlike the other three-part works mentioned.

McCahon was still not finished with the Letter. In February 1980 he painted another three-parter on paper: Paul to Hebrews, using different verses from chapter 11. Other passages from Hebrews 11 were later incorporated into the major work A Painting for Uncle Frank (1980), making a total of seven works (several of them multiples) utilising the Letter. Collectively this Pauline cluster might be seen as McCahon’s penultimate series (1979-80) – a New Testament re-assertion of faith to set against his final group of four with texts from Ecclesiastes (1980-82), expressing Old Testament doubt and despair.

In The Testimony of Scripture, especially numbers 1 and 2, text is used more sparingly than in the other works of the group. Testimony 1 and 2 each incorporates a single verse (Chapter 11, verses 1 and 3, respectively), while Testimony 3 – much wordier but with smaller lettering – comprises verses 4 to 7 of the chapter.

Testimony 2 is much the most colourful of the three, the other two being confined to black and white only. It also has more complex non-textual imagery than the others. The text, strongly written in cursive script (except for the word ‘GOD”) in black on variably toned ochre ground, takes up the top three-quarters of the picture. An irregular strip of white along the top edge is suggestive of clouds therefore rendering the ochre ground of the text an evening skyscape above a horizon represented by a dark band across the bottom quarter of the painting. This black band is interrupted by a white shape taking the form of a Tau-cross (ubiquitous in McCahon’s late paintings) which appears to hold the text up like a banner. As often with McCahon’s late works, multiple readings between landscape and abstraction are encouraged by his exploiting figure/ground ambiguities and using other devices which subvert a simple realist interpretation of the imagery.

Testimony of Scripture 2 is a superb painting closely linked by colour, medium, imagery, texts, supports and size with many other works in McCahon’s late output.

Peter Simpson