When McCahon declared, ‘I will need words,’ in a 1961 letter to poet John Caselberg, he was saying he needed them for something. He wanted his paintings to speak: to cut through, to communicate, to be clear in a new way about human fears and hopes and about how to love authentically. And he saw that painted words were a way to approach spiritual realities and urgencies that resisted conventional picturing.
Justin Paton, McCahon Country
The kids found the beautiful leaf this is based on when we went on a walk yesterday. I didn’t really do it justice. This is dark and flat and pretty messy (I didn’t handle the veins or the edges of the leaf well). Oh well, the idea was there.
Once the painter was making signs and symbols for people to live by: now he makes things to hang on walls at exhibitions.
Colin McCahon in McCahon Country by Justin Paton
[A painting is] not a drawing; it’s a mosaic of shapes.
Michael Chamberlain on The Artful Painter
This Wednesday just been (1 April) was our final Beginning to Draw & Paint class at Browne. It was meant to be on abstraction, but because we’d moved to Zoom and it would’ve been tricky to teach by video, Matthew decided to continue with the previous week’s subject of transcription and analysis.
