29. Colin McCahon (1919 - 1987)
From Mt. Atkinson, Titirangi, 1958
Watercolour
28.5 x 37.4 cm
Signed & dated 1958
est. $20,000 - 30,000
Fetched $28,000
Relative Size: From Mt. Atkinson, Titirangi, 1958
Relative size

PROVENANCE Elizabeth Steiner Collection

Colin McCahon database. record number cm000534

Watercolour was a medium which Colin McCahon utilised only occasionally, at least by comparison with such contemporaries as Woollaston, Angus, Lusk and Spencer Bower who used it frequently. Among the first paintings McCahon made when he moved to Auckland in 1953 was the 6-part watercolour series, Towards Auckland (1953-54). He wrote to his friend Ron O'Reilly: 'I found a grid of diagonals helped hold the image on the paper & freed the imagination to let the image expand' (quoted in Simpson, Colin McCahon The Titirangi Years, AUP, 2007, p. 32). This diagonal grid came from McCahon's effort, influenced by Cubism, to find a new way of ordering space in a picture that did not rely on traditional perspective. From Mount Atkinson, Titirangi, five years later, still shows remnants of this grid in the clearly visible forward and backward leaning diagonal strokes in the picture. A device McCahon learned from Cézanne and Woollaston, his most important early mentors, was to tilt the landscape up towards the viewer in something approaching a bird's eye view so as to bring distant things closer. An elevated perspective, such as the 'mountain' named in the title also enhances this effect. These two devices - the grid and the tilted landscape - animate the watercolour. Blues, greys, ochres and browns, mostly in pale tones but with occasional dark patches, dominate the colour palette. The light touch of the brush work, allowing plenty of white paper to show through, achieves a harmonious effect, and demonstrates the artist's exceptional skill, even in this infrequently adopted medium.

Note: The McCahon website (www.mccahon.co.nz) lists this painting as being shown at the 1957 Group Show in Christchurch, but the date on the painting is clearly 1958. Certainly a painting of this title was shown in 1957, so either McCahon mis-dated it later or else the work shown in 1957 was a different painting. The 1958 Group Show included a work entitled Landscape from Mt Atkinson, so possibly this is that work. However, the price asked, 15 guineas, given his prices at that time, suggests that it was an oil painting not a water-colour. This small mystery has yet to be resolved.

PETER SIMPSON

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