Coffee with Colin
Decades after his death, Colin McCahon’s life and work still strongly resonate. Pauline Harper looks back on her time with the legend of New Zealand art.
During the 1970s I interviewed Colin McCahon. I was a freelance journalist checking out artists who caught my eye, ringing them up and asking if I could talk with them for one of a few mags for whom I was an occasional stringer.
I let them know too that it was a risk and the story may never see the light of day. Some were famous, some were on their way somewhere. It was all about connecting – and hoping.
Yes, Colin’s name was in the phone book. Easy to give a ring. He invited me for a cup of coffee at his house in Grey Lynn, Auckland; a straightforward, unpretentious home where he lived with his wife Ann. It was before the Muriwai studio days because there was his working room, a ‘spare-type’ room off the kitchen. This was where we all sat down to drink coffee – brought to the boil in a pot and then strained. (We all did that in those days. I can still recall the taste of the escaped grounds, a raw and gritty sensation; you knew it was real coffee, delicious).
Of all the stacks of interviews I did during that decade, this was the only one I never wrote up. Perhaps I was overwhelmed by the strange magnitude of this small, intense – and also very likeable – man. Perhaps life got in the way.
However, the experience and his words have never left me. That’s why there’s a cathartic sense right now, as we celebrate 101 years since his birth, of that morning in the McCahons’ unremarkable Auckland suburb… the coffee, the talking and the room close by with the paintings.
The three of us sat finishing off the pot and I heard about the Samoan kids who climbed through the fence taking a short cut to school; his background in Timaru and a knowledge of Geraldine (my hometown). Then some of the history. Study, ambitions and even absences. That last adjoiner was from Anne who inferred that these absences were usually untimely.
I didn’t ask for any detail. I reckoned that I was leaving real comment and analysis to the art historians and those in the art world hierarchy. I would absorb that morning, remember the words and gain a sense that, from that morning on, I would follow Colin McCahon’s art wherever I could find it, for the rest of my life.
We moved on to his painting. Messages in the landscape, like ‘‘eggs two and six a dozen. Drive in’’. I’ve never looked at a vegetable – or eggs – for sale message since, without thinking of Colin McCahon.
How different everyone’s idea of colour and beauty is, he said. ‘‘Those holy pictures.’’ I had had a Catholic background and in my very young boarding school days we even traded in ‘‘holy pictures’’. Gregg’s instant pudding pinks and blues, Colin called them. They’re exactly how those amazingly sentimental Jesus, Mary and Josephs can be described.
Once we got to the 1970s I became a bit of a snob. That folksy bright is passe´ . Colin could see through the eyes of so many who loved it, related to it and found comfort from it in a world of struggle. I changed some of my thinking from that moment.
I also went out during that brief few days spent visiting Auckland, to a Catholic Church about which Colin had spoken fondly. A bigger world where I realised our integration with a spiritual whenua can happen through images and colour I found.
And that’s always the grounded base of McCahon’s work. He began painting with religious themes in the 1940s and, through the 1950s, increasingly used text with so many stunning triptychs following.
A couple of years ago a sketch for the window of a church in Te Puke by Colin McCahon was one of the most sought-after works at the Waikato Art Auction. Its estimated value was $9000 to $14,000. The sketch became a central design in St Patrick’s Catholic Church in Te Puke (maybe, as I now reminisce about my long-ago conversation with Colin, that church needs to be visited before I become too much older). Earlier that month his painting Canoe Tainui sold for $1.35 million, setting a record as the most expensive piece of artwork sold at auction in New Zealand.
I’m always moved by emotion and awe when I’m in the presence of his art. I follow it keenly, and carry around postcards bought in art galleries to become markers in diaries and other handbag furniture. Six days in Nelson and Canterbury was there for years thanks to The Northland Panels – right now it’s I Paul to you at Ngatimoti, from 1946. Said someone in one of the many catalogues I’ve devoured over the years ‘‘landscape and the transfer of biblical images as metaphor for the human condition, the journey of life’’.
Then you’re suddenly in the presence of the real thing and you take a seat. And this is always a great pleasure; sitting gazing at his work. It takes you into the depths of the landscape, the underbelly that’s both geological and psychological, historical and mythical. He had lamented his Aotearoa was ‘‘a landscape with too few lovers’’. So he sought a spiritual basis by stripping his landscapes of built features, trees and objects irrelevant to his scientific themes.
He wanted to ‘‘throw people into an involvement with the raw land and also the raw paint … like spitting in the clay to open the blind man’s eyes’’. Now I realise that the 1970s was a time when vitriol and scepticism had cast cataract-like layers over the eyes of many of the people of Aotearoa.
One of Colin’s greatest works, Victory Over Death 2 (1970), was selected by Hamish Keith and Peter McLeavey to be gifted by the New Zealand Government to Australia to celebrate its bicentenary in 1978. Due to an unpleasant spot of political manipulation on the part of the then Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, the Cabinet voted 5-1 not to buy the painting. The treatment created despair and paranoia for Colin. ‘‘I’m not finished yet,’’ he said at the time. ‘‘Just real buggered.’’
He despaired at the mass of imagery flooding television screens nightly and its impact on our collective image systems.
Debilitated by illness, he ceased painting altogether in the later years. He died in Auckland in 1987 at the age of 67.
I’ve never looked at a vegetable – or eggs – for sale message since, without thinking of Colin McCahon. Pauline Harper, above
During the 1980s and 1990s I met up from time to time with Peter McLeavey in his Wellington, Cuba St gallery. Along with Barry Lett in Auckland he represented Colin McCahon and exhibited his work frequently (these works were consistently sought for public and private collections and shown in multiple survey shows in New Zealand and Australia).
Peter would talk about Colin’s vast knowledge of what lay ‘‘underneath and beyond’’ the immediate landscape. The mythology and the geology: that spiritual quest which was always such a driving force. I remember, too, Peter’s marvellous description of absolute creative ability. ‘‘If Colin picked up a dishcloth and squeezed it out on the top of a bar counter, it would form a significant symbol – something of beauty.’’
The witness, the observer, the man who can truly see – and the maker. Encounters with these two remarkable men, both now deceased, in the form of comparatively brief conversations, continue to influence me, help me with the journey of life. And I shall always enjoy coffee with a few escaped – and gritty – grains, made in a pot on the stove.