A plump kereru beats Mccahon

So it’s the hundredth anniversary of something to do with Colin Mccahon. Is it his birth, perhaps, his death, his circumcision? I don’t know and neither do I care. For, call me Philly, call me Stein, I think Mccahon was a lousy painter. And there’s a pigeon in my apricot tree.

The pigeon’s a native, a kereru, plump and smug. We didn’t get kereru in Lyttelton till about five years ago. Now there’s a pair nesting just up the hill from me, and with their bellies of bed-sheet white and their backs of greeny-purple petrol sheen, and their swooping flight and their wings that hum, they please me and I find them beautiful. I cannot say the same of any painting by Mccahon.

Nevertheless I have a mind so open it could host a golf tournament, so when an anniversary article appeared in the paper, I read it in the hope of finding what all the fuss was about. For I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve been told Mccahon’s a wonder and I’m a rube.

The article was long on assertion but short on explanation. It told me that Mccahon’s paintings were ‘incredible’, that a nice big one might fetch a million bucks, and that Mccahon himself was ‘‘one of the immortals’’. But it didn’t tell me why. Though it did praise Mccahon for his ‘‘engagement with his immediate environment’’.

Bravo, I thought. I like a bit of engaging with the environment myself, especially at this time of the year. I can stare for minutes on end at the bellbirds in the kowhai, at the kowhai flowers the colour of old butter, at the bean seedlings bursting like aliens from the pots in my greenhouse, at the delicacy of apple blossom, at any number of wonders including, yea, verily, a pigeon in an apricot tree, but that doesn’t make me a great painter.

Mccahon, I read, was an idiosyncratic personality and a religious crank. Again, bravo, but if idiosyncratic personalities make great painters then come with me to any pub in Lyttelton and I’ll show you an Uffizi-ful.

Religious cranks aren’t rare birds either.

Plunge a hand into my weekly mailbag and you stand a one-in-three chance of coming up with one. (The odds are similar, by the way, of coming up with a Trump supporter, which is apt because there’s little to tell between them. Both belong to cults. And neither, it need hardly be said, is a great painter.)

At Les Eyzies in the south of France some 40 years ago I queued in blinding heat to enter a cave. Once inside, my eyes took a while to adjust to the dimness, then they made out paintings on the wall, paintings of deer and bison, wolves and fish, paintings done 10,000 years before Mccahon ever lifted a brush. And they were stunning. They captured the essence of the beasts. They pleased me as Mccahon never has.

To be fair, few painters do. I’ve been to galleries and stood before well-known paintings and rarely been much moved. And I’ve noticed I am not alone. People seek out the famous paintings then stand with their backs to them to be photographed. The fame’s the thing, not the picture.

But what I think doesn’t matter. Mccahon has been anointed and anointment’s irreversible. No painter ever unbecomes a maestro. And now that he is safely dead the prices for his works will rise forever, regardless of their merits.

Or so it seems to me. And what do I know? Only that there’s a pigeon in my apricot and that I like it.