Name: Coffee + Art
Location: Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū

Coffee + Art

Colin McCahon Canterbury Plains c.1950–52. Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwehtu, gifted by the family of Mary and Arthur Prior, 2017. Courtesy of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust

Friends

Past event

Universo Brasserie & Bar

Free (Art Bite talk only)

Join the Friends for a caffeine fix and great conversation in Universo, then enjoy a 30 minute Art Bite talk.

Join our registrar Gina Irish and paintings conservator Olivia Pitts as they discuss the acquisition, journey and preparation of Colin McCahon's Canterbury Plains for display in the first-floor collection galleries.

Related reading: Colin McCahon, Friends

Exhibition

Our Collection: 19th and 20th Century New Zealand Art

3 March 2018 – 3 March 2020

Our lively new historical collection exhibitions explore Māori architecture, colonial portraiture, early landscape painting and mid-century abstraction.

Collection

Colin McCahon Canterbury Plains

During his time living in Ōtautahi Christchurch in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Colin McCahon completed several paintings of the hills and plains of the Waitaha Canterbury region. The geometric patterns of the paddocks and shelter belts in this work hint at McCahon’s growing interest in abstraction, which would become a major focus in his work. This painting is thought to have been inspired by Te Whakatakanga-o-te-ngārehu-o-te-ahi-a-Tamatea, the city’s Port Hills, not far from where the McCahon family lived in the suburb of Waltham.

He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)

Commentary

Of Braided Rivers and Hydro-Traders

“With 14,000km of coastline, over 180,000km of rivers, and 3,820 lakes, there’s more to the land of the long white cloud than land…” So began an advertisement in a recent Sunday Star Times. It might have been the opening gambit for a campaign devoted to water conservation but was, in fact, a promotion for the latest model jet ski: “And all you need to unlock it is the all-new Yamaha Waverunner FX HO… SAME PLANET, DIFFERENT WORLD. Yamaha-motor.co.nz.”

Continued

Commentary

Colin McCahon: Five Years in Christchurch, 1948–53

Prior to moving to Christchurch in March 1948, Colin McCahon and his family spent a little over a year living in Muritai Street, Tahunanui, on the outskirts of Nelson city. It was his most productive period as a painter to date – a phase dominated by figurative paintings with some landscapes. The products of this prolific period were brought together in his first major one-person show, at Wellington Public Library in February 1948, organised by his Dunedin friend, Ron O’Reilly. An exhibition of forty-two works made between 1939 to 1948, more than half produced in 1947, it consisted of roughly equal numbers of landscapes (including Otago Peninsula and Maitai Valley), biblical paintings (King of the Jews, Crucifixion according to St Mark ), and non-biblical figurative works (A candle in a dark room, The Family). Although it was reviewed favourably in The Listener by J.C. Beaglehole, the subsequent letters column ran hot with controversy, and it brought McCahon to national attention.

Continued