Peter Simpson on Colin McCahon 'A Poem of Kaipara Flat – Buttercup Fields Forever'

Peter Simpson on Colin McCahon 'A Poem of Kaipara Flat – Buttercup Fields Forever'

Featured in Important Paintings & Contemporary Art | Tuesday 15 August 2023

This vivid watercolour and pastel – reminiscent of early Rothko in its division into horizontal zones of brilliant colour, but retaining the reference to sky and earth so characteristic of McCahon – was painted in 1971, the year that, aged 51, McCahon boldly left his teaching job at Elam to paint full-time. He told Peter McLeavey: ‘This business of living off painting is tough. So far – so good – but I’ve got to keep it up or Anne and I starve’ (Simpson, Colin McCahon: Is This the Promised Land, AUP 2020, p. 149).

Among the early results of his new freedom was a flood of watercolours – more than 50 in 1971 alone – mostly of scenes around Muriwai (where his studio was) and nearby localities such as Helensville and Kaipara Flats. Immediately distinctive in these works is the vibrancy, intensity and variety of their colour, especially as they followed a period dominated by black and white, as in the biblical and Maori text paintings of 1969-70. He told a friend: ‘All this colour & fun is a direct result of leaving the school’ (Simpson, ibid.). Many were gathered together in two exhibitions: View from the top of the cliff at Peter McLeavey’s in Wellington in April and New Paintings at Dawson’s Gallery, Dunedin, in August. Among other paintings, 18 watercolours were shown at McLeavey’s, 12 at Dawsons.

The present work was in the exhibition at Dawson’s. In a poster for the exhibition (itself a brightly coloured watercolour) McCahon listed the contents of the exhibition as: Helensville Kaipara Flats The days & nights in the wilderness and necessary protection. The watercolours were grouped into three distinct series: Helensville (4), Poems of Kaipara Flat (4) and Kaipara Flat – written (3). There are other examples of all three series that were not included in the Dunedin exhibition, possibly as many as 18 in the Poems of Kaipara Flat series.

A poem of Kaipara Flat – Buttercup fields forever is one of only two in the series which has a double-barrelled title (the other subtitle being Evening, looking towards Waioneke). Kaipara Flats is a rural area on the shores of Kaipara Harbour about an hour’s drive north of Muriwai. In a note for the Dunedin exhibition McCahon called it ‘a shockingly beautiful area – I do not recommend any of this landscape as a tourist resort. It is wild and beautiful; empty and utterly beautiful...The light and sunsets here are appropriately magnificent’. The flat land and huge skies encourage, as here, lyrical, even Turneresque, colouristic effusions. What McCahon meant by the term ‘A poem...’ is a matter of speculation. He was an avid reader of and an occasional writer of poetry, and even described himself as a ‘frustrated poet’. That is probably sufficient explanation for his occasional appropriation of ‘poem’ for paintings; perhaps, too, the recurrent horizontals are reminiscent of lines of poetry. The phrase ‘buttercup fields forever’, taking off from the Beatles’ 1967 song Strawberry Fields Forever, was used in paintings from 1967 to 1975, including as title (or subtitle) for several of the 1971 watercolours. Presumably in this case in response to bright flowers observed in the environment as suggested by the patches of yellow suffusing the green beneath the blue in this radiant and flamboyant painting.

Peter Simpson