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Lot #24 - Colin McCahon

  • Auction House:
    Mossgreen-Webb's
  • Sale Name:
    The Peter Jarvis & Helene Phillips Collection
  • Sale Date:
    30 Nov 2017 ~ 6.30pm (New Zealand Daylight Time)
  • Lot #:
    24
  • Lot Description:
    Colin McCahon
    Kaipara Flat - written
    watercolour, 1971
    1015mm x 675mm
    signed McCahon and dated '71 in graphite lower left and inscribed Kaipara Flat - written in graphite lower centre
  • References:
    ILLUSTRATED: Colin McCahon Trust Record Number cm00494; Marja Bloem and Martin Browne, Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith, (Amsterdam: Craig Potton Publishing and Stedelijk Museum, 2002), p.216.; Art New Zealand #98 p.9.
  • Notes:
    ESSAY: In 1968, McCahon established his Muriwai studio and, during the period that followed, he focused on exploring his new surroundings and producing several major bodies of work, including Helensville, The Days and Nights in the Wilderness, View from the Top of the Cliff, Poems of Kaipara Flat, Kaipara Flat and Necessary Protection. The new studio and its natural surroundings had a profound effect on McCahon’s work. This is not surprising, given that his previous studios were in less inspiring quarters, including the attic of Auckland Art Gallery. The landscape series he produced in the early 1970s take the audience beyond the conventional understanding of the genre. McCahon attributed the ‘colour and fun’ in the work of this period to his leaving his teaching position at Elam in 1970. In August 1971, he exhibited several recently painted landscapes of the region, including A Poem for Kaipara Flat 3, Helensville and The Days and Nights in the Wilderness, at Dawson’s Gallery in Dunedin. In an artist statement for that show, he described the view from his workspace: “… From my studio at the south end of Muriwai Beach the beach and sand bar that fronts the Tasman Sea extends 48 miles to the Kaipara Harbour mouth. This is the sand dune and lake area of Waioneke. Kaipara Flats are north of Helensville. This is a shockingly beautiful area. North again from Kaipara Flats a dry and North Otago-like area happens…”1 Kaipara Flats – written is based on the area of flat land that borders Kaipara Harbour: a landscape beyond the Kaipara Heads that is visible from Muriwai Beach. The vertical format of this composition focuses the viewer on the bright sky and diminishes the apparent scale of the land beneath it. The dark-blue, flurried brush strokes above the landscape’s horizon line suggest airborne black sand, soot unsettled by wind currents or the movement of birds hovering in a strong breeze. The swirling brushwork, spiritual tone and conservationist message were features of several of McCahon’s series that were produced at his Muriwai studio. The non-figurative nature of the landscape scene and the reduction of colour to two main hues are features reminiscent of the abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko. McCahon had seen Rothko’s work on a trip to the USA in 1958. Similar to Rothko’s work, Kaipara Flats – written evokes a spiritual resonance. This painting communicates the connection McCahon felt with Auckland’s West Coast landscape and Māori culture, and his passion for conservation. McCahon painted Kaipara Flats – written during the same year that he completed his Necessary Protection and View from the Top of the Cliff works. In common with these two other series, this image expresses his personal despair at what was happening to the natural environment of this coastline. His conservationist concerns in relation to the View from the Top of the Cliff works are conveyed in his words: “I am painting about what is still there and what I can still see before the sky turns black with soot and the sea becomes a slowly heaving rubbish tip.”2 Although this painting does not contain the poetry featured in his Poems of Kaipara Flat, painted in the same year, it refers to this artist’s interest in text through the incorporation of the word ‘written’ in the title. The painting’s title brings to mind Gregory O’Brien’s comment that McCahon’s work “embodies both an engagement and an argument with the visual and verbal traditions which shaped it.” 1. G H. Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, A H & A W Reed, Wellington, 1984, p. 109. 2. Earth/Earth, Barry Lett Galleries, Auckland, 1971. Natalie Poland
  • Estimate:
    NZ$80,000 - 120,000
  • Realised Price:
    *****

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  • Category:
    Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.



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