Colin McCahon

Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1919, d.1987

Canterbury Landscape

1952
Oil on canvas
Purchased with the support of Christchurch City Council's Challenge Grant to the Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation, 2014.
Reproduced courtesy of Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust
761 x 890mm
2014/088

Tags: abstraction, landscapes (representations), natural landscapes

'Pākihi is a word for a place that is bare or without trees. The Pākehā surveyors called these cleared areas parkee from the Māori word for no trees, pākihi. Kā Pākihi-Whakatekateka-A-Waitaha: the treeless place, the joyous strutting march through the treeless land of south Canterbury, Waitaha – that’s the old name for the Canterbury Plains.' —Sir Tipene O’Regan

(He Rau Maharataka Whenua: A Memory of Land, 17 September 2016 – 18 February 2017)

Exhibition History

other labels about this work

In the vast emptiness, 8 January - 21 August 2016

The immense scale of the Canterbury Plains, stretching away into the distance, is the subject of this painting. Based on aerial photographs of North Canterbury, the perspective, with just a sliver of sky on the horizon, compresses and tilts the landscape into various simplified shapes of paddocks, divided and defined by shelter belts. Colin McCahon’s interest in cubism at the time was spurred by time spent studying under Mary Cockburn Mercer, an elderly Australian artist who had studied with some of the original cubists in Paris in the early twentieth century.

When asked in 1976 what effect the flatness of Canterbury had on his painting in the early 1950s, McCahon's reply centred around the division of space: “[T]he simple division is one I’ve used ever since. It was a discovery at the time, it was a real discovery.”

Related reading: In the Vast Emptiness

film

Baxter and McCahon: a conversation

Two of the greats of the New Zealand art world – artist Colin McCahon and poet James K. Baxter – were friends. And fell out. As poet Gregory O’Brien says, 'They were such big spirits, I guess they couldn’t last that long in a room together.' O’Brien, Dr Paul Millar, author, professor of English and head of the School of Humanities at the University of Canterbury, and Dr Peter Simpson, writer, critic, academic and curator, are all experts on the work and personalities of these two men. On 6 March 2016 they got together before an audience at the Gallery for a fascinating discussion about Baxter and McCahon.

film

Colin McCahon - Canterbury Landscape

Colin McCahon speaks about his art. From an interview with Ray Thorburn for the Department of Education, 1982.

Reproduced with the permission of the Ministry of Education and the kind co-operation of Ray Thorburn and the family of Colin McCahon.