In 1968, a significant shift occurred in McCahon’s life when he moved from working at his family home, in the Auckland suburb of Grey Lynn, to a purpose-built studio in the small, west coast community of Muriwai. For the first time in his life, McCahon had a large, dedicated space, away from urban pressures, where he could focus solely on his artistic practice. The eight years that he would spend working from this studio would later become recognised as being among the most productive of years of his career.

 The work at hand is best contextualised against three different series of paintings that McCahon completed whilst working from his Muriwai studio: the Helensville paintings of 1968, the Helensville paintings of 1971 and the Kaipara Flat paintings of 1971. The first phase of Helensville works, made in the same year McCahon moved into his Muriwai studio, can be seen to extend the formal concerns that were first evident in McCahon’s Otago and Canterbury landscapes of the early 1950s. In these works, rather than explore the topography of the regions, McCahon chose to focus solely on the physical attributes of the land. In a manner that recalled European modernism of the early 20th century, these works were more determined by the flow of the artist’s hand than by the ebb and flow of the hillside. The 1968 Helensville works stripped the landscape back to its bare essentials: ground and sky. Only their naturalistic colouration – a deep green for the lower half of the picture plane and a warm white above – indicated that they described the natural world.

 The second phase of the Helensville series, to which the work at hand belongs, was completed in the same year as was the Kaipara Flat series. While these are two distinct bodies of works, all of the landscapes that McCahon painted during 1971 share certain similarities. In these works, we see the artist return to exploring the landscape’s potential to serve as a structural device. In the Helensville works of 1968, it was only a change of colour that described where the land ended and the sky began. However, in the later landscapes, McCahon depicted the horizon with dense areas of colour, treating it as an entity that had its own symbolic value irrespective of the land mass below and the sky above. Throughout the year of 1971, the colours which McCahon used to give body to the land and sky deviated further and further from being a literal transcription of the world before him. Deep oranges, reds and purples were used to give depth to the geothermal and meteorological forces that flowed through and over the landscape. While the landscapes of this format lack overt religious symbolism, they do demonstrate McCahon’s profound reverence for forces greater than himself.

 In comparison to other works that he would paint during this year, the colouration of the work at hand is a fairly direct translation of the natural world’s physical appearance. However, what make it particularly notable are the material qualities of its painted surface. While many of the works completed in this period are typified by a sparse use of paint, Helensville 1971 has been meticulously developed into a resonant field of opaque tone from composite layers of watercolour. Furthermore, in contrast to the formidable and singularly identifiable brush strokes found elsewhere in this period, in Helensville 1971, individual strokes can be seen only in the areas around the edges where the paint coverage is slightly pared back. Rather than operating in a purely pictorial realm, this iteration of the Helensville series has a glowing presence that can truly be felt. McCahon’s ability to constitute such a surface using a medium that consists solely of pigment and no opaque matter demonstrates a remarkable fortitude. His liberal and unorthodox use of the watercolour medium was somewhat emblematic of the approach that would define his work from here onwards: where markings were arrived at rather than simply laid down.

Charles Ninow