‘As there is a constant flow of light we are born into the pure land.’ Colin McCahon quoted this text often on works between the mid-1960s and early 1970s: he took it from the writings of a twelfth-century Japanese Buddhist monk, Shinran, who was the founder of a tradition known as Pure Land Buddhism. McCahon had long been interested in light as a metaphor both for faith and enlightenment, and had begun a related series of dramatic semi-abstract waterfall paintings in 1964, in which a curve of white light cleaved through darkness. Here the landscape element has been reduced to a simple horizon, a dividing line between sky and sea, or sky and land, at the very edge of vision. (March 2018)

Colin McCahon was an important figure in Jonathan Mane-Wheoki’s (Ngāpuhi, Te Aupōuri, Ngāti Kuri) life – first a family friend when Mane-Wheoki’s family moved to Titirangi in the 1950s, and then a teacher when he attended the night classes McCahon taught in the attic of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. While he was a student at the University of Canterbury, Mane-Wheoki frequently visited the Robert McDougall Art Gallery to view McCahon’s Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is, and the work held a special place in his heart. The other two works shown here were purchased when Mane-Wheoki was in London studying at the Courtauld Institute of Art. While there, he was commissioned by the McDougall Gallery to purchase works for the collection. In 1974, Mane-Wheoki recommended the entire budget he had available be allocated for the purchase of this Degas etching, and the following year he secured this Andy Warhol print, both small yet exemplary international works.

(Living Archives, 25 October 2025 – 8 March 2026, exhibited alongside 'Manet assis, tourné à droite' by Edgar Degas and 'Mao tse-Tung' by Andy Warhol)

The hot, dry nor'west winds of Canterbury produce dramatic cloud formations and an atmospheric light. Petrus van der Velden has captured these effects with what is probably Christchurch's River Avon in the foreground. He lived near the river between 1890 and 1893. The colonial woman bent over, occupied with her task of work, has echoes of his earlier Dutch paintings, which focused on Dutch peasants at work. Van der Velden painted in a realist manner, which was influenced by his association with the Dutch Hague School of painters who favoured dark sombre tones and a loose style of brushwork. The nor'west scene is created by using strong contrasts of light and shade (chiaroscuro). Born in Rotterdam, Van der Velden established himself as a painter, particularly of marine subjects, in Holland, from where he emigrated in 1890. However, he struggled to make a living in Christchurch and in 1898 went to Sydney. He returned to settle in Wellington in 1904 but died in Auckland.

For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:

“As a painter I may often be more worried about you than you are about me and if I wasn’t concerned I’d not be doing my work properly as a painter. Painting can be a potent way of talking.

“Do you believe in the sunrise?

“My painting year happens first in late winter and early spring. I paint with the season and paint best during the long hot summers. I prefer to paint at night or more especially in the late summer afternoons when, as the light fades, tonal relationships become terrifyingly clear.

“At night I paint under a very large incandescent light bulb. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I am only now, and slowly, becoming able to paint in the morning. After a lifetime of working – farming, factories, gardening, teaching, the years at the Auckland City Art Gallery – I find it hard to paint in the world’s usual work-time. It can be difficult to accept that painting too is work.”

—Colin McCahon, 1972

In 1958, Colin McCahon spent several months in America, visiting numerous art museums to see historical and contemporary art from the United States and Europe. Returning to a wintry Aotearoa New Zealand, he struggled to readjust. Eventually he found solace and inspiration in memories of a place very close to his heart – the wild, wind-sculpted landscape of Aotearoa’s Far North. Oil paintings were followed by a series of ink wash drawings, painted on paper spread out over the floor like a continuous, unfolding frieze. They are dark and lonely images, full of longing and a sense of return. “It’s a painful love, loving a land,” McCahon wrote. “It takes a long time.”

(Absence, May 2023)

“The greatest of all lessons is to learn to see. Many are ‘colour blind’ till they have their eyes opened to nature’s lessons, which she is always trying to teach us. But we must always tell what nature says to us, simply and directly without pretence or falsehood. Tell the Truth. Christ was the greatest artist. His words and pictures are a simple telling of nature's lessons – they are always the Truth. ‘We reason with colours. Colours are dead’, but by telling what nature teaches us the dead colours enable us to express the wonders and beauties of the Creator’s work.”

—Petrus van der Velden

(McCahon / Van der Velden, 18 December 2015 – 7 August 2016)