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Colin McCahon

On going out with the tide

Priscilla Pitts
Eyeline 88
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Colin McCahon: On Going Out with the Tide, held at City Gallery Wellington, is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work since the Stedelijk Museum’s Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith in 2002. Whereas A Question of Faith sought to position McCahon as a significant modernist artist worthy of attention in an international sphere,1On Going Out with the Tide locates him squarely within the New Zealand context—these works could not have been made anywhere else. However, this is not the ‘regionalist’ McCahon of the early landscape paintings or religious subjects placed in what are seen as identifiably New Zealand settings. Instead, On Going Out with the Tide shows us McCahon coming to terms with imagery, histories and concepts of significance to Māori.


The exhibition is organised in five sections which guide visitors on a path through time, place and the artist’s growing understanding of Maoritanga. There is also an introductory ‘documents gallery’. Let us pause there for a moment and take in a large photograph of two young Māori men, Lionel and Ray Skipper, in work gear and muddy gumboots, hesitating in the doorway of Peter McLeavey’s dealer gallery in 1975, with McCahon’s painting A Poster for the Urewera No. 2 on the wall beside them. In an exhibition that seeks to interrogate McCahon’s work in the context of ‘a tectonic shift in New Zealand culture—emerging biculturalism’,2 this image remains revealing and pertinent.


In the first of the exhibition’s five sections,  the painting Io, in which the letters I and O are positioned above a cave-like black void, and the all-black Journey into a Dark Landscape No. 2 (both 1965) bespeak an artist exploring something only... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Lionel and Ray Skipper with Colin McCahon's A Poster for the Urewera No. 2, 1975

Lionel and Ray Skipper with Colin McCahon's A Poster for the Urewera No. 2, 1975 at Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington, December 1975. Photograph Don Roy. Fairfax Media NZ/Dominion Post

The Days and Nights in the Wilderness Showing the Constant Flow of Light Passing into a Dark Landscape, 1971.

The Days and Nights in the Wilderness Showing the Constant Flow of Light Passing into a Dark Landscape, 1971. Acrylic on unstretched canvas, 2360 x 1840mm. Collection Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth. Images courtesy Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust