Northland panels

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In 1958 Colin McCahon and his wife Anne spent four months in the United States. This afforded McCahon ample opportunity to see an enormous amount of art: everything from Old Masters to recent American art, with modern European painting and classical Asian art in between.

Not surprisingly, returning to painting in New Zealand was difficult. ‘I had seen deserts and tumbleweed in fences and the Salt Lake Flats, and the Faulkner country with magnolias in bloom, cities — taller by far than kauri trees,’ McCahon later recalled. ‘I fled north in memory and painted the Northland panels.’ They were painted, he wrote, ‘on the sun deck at Titirangi all on one Sunday afternoon and corrected for weeks afterwards’.1

Like the landscape on which they are based, the Northland panels combine rawness with moments of great beauty. There are also texts painted into the landscapes. ‘Rain’ indicates a change in the weather in the fourth panel, while in the sixth panel the word ‘Tui’ appears three times. Painted in black with a tuft of white that recalls the bird’s plumage, the repetition of the word suggests the sound of the tūī’s song echoing throughout the landscape. The fifth panel announces that this is ‘a landscape with too few lovers’ — a sentiment that sums up McCahon’s concern for the New Zealand countryside.

The influence on McCahon of his visit to the United States has been much debated. The scale of the Northland panels has generally been identified as McCahon’s response to the mural-sized works of the New York School artists, while the painterly treatment of the landscape derives more from their West Coast counterparts. The scroll-like format of the panels and their vertical arrangement of space, among other elements, suggest an interest in Eastern sources. In San Francisco, McCahon saw an exhibition of the work of Meiji-period Japanese painter Tomioka Tessai, whose work had an enormous impact on him.

Whatever influences were at work in the Northland panels, McCahon made them entirely his own. When the Northland panels debuted at the Auckland City Art Gallery in June 1959, architect and critic IV Porsolt hailed the painting in the New Zealand Herald as ‘perhaps the best McCahon has exhibited so far’.2

William McAloon

1 Colin McCahon: A survey exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Auckland City Art Gallery, Auckland, 1972, p. 25.

2 IVP (IV Porsolt), ‘Gallery addition to festival — Three painters exhibit’, New Zealand Herald, 3 June 1959, p. 9.

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The Northland panels by Colin McCahon are eight unframed canvases that each depict a different scene of Northland. Painted in one afternoon using house paint, but added to and changed over the next few months, the panels are designed as ‘pictures for people to walk past.’

McCahon made the Nothland panels after seeing the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning during a tour to the United States. Their work inspired him to paint at larger scale and in a more expressionist style.

McCahon constructed the panels using recycled canvases from incomplete paintings in his studio, and painted them with house paint.

McCahon loved Northland deeply. These eight panels express his passion, not in any one view but rather as a journey, sometimes accompanied by words, through the region’s rugged landscape.