Featuring a reduced palette and a boldly simplified composition, Colin McCahon's Northland from 1962 offers the viewer a sombre, contemplative and harmonious yet dynamic canvas. Dominated by earthy yellow and inky black, Northland nevertheless manages to possess a myriad of variant shades as the colours bleed and merge. The tracks left by McCahon's brush are highly visible and imbue the painting with an added visual dimension, activating the canvas through the rich stains of pigment. Indeed, McCahon's technique in the execution of this series was responsible for the final textured appearance of paintings: "the canvas was made sopping wet and on this oil paint was used, but only after most of the oil had been soaked out first by putting it on paper. This gives a very matt finish to the final painting, but it has to be done very quickly". In line with the reductionist ethic of colour in the painting, form has received a similarly simplified approach. The rolling hills and wide expanses of the Northland region have been distilled into two cursory semicircular shapes which appear to extend and unfold beyond the picture plane. The undulating contours of the golden shape at the top of the canvas and the more distinctly ovoid shape sprouting from the bottom of the canvas are characteristic form for the Northland series, serving as McCahon's highly idiosyncratic shorthand for mountainous structures. The present painting is one of a series that showed McCahon returning to the landscape of Northland after the geometric abstractions that had prevailed in the paintings from the Gate series of 1961. Painted from memory and recollection, the Northland paintings establish a direct link to the earlier Northland Panels of 1958 that had been completed following McCahon's return to New Zealand from America. Of his return and subsequent painting, the artist stated: "We went home to the bush of Titirangi. It was cold and dripping and shut in.... and I had seen deserts and tumbleweed... the Salt Lake Falls and the Faulkner country... My lovely Kauris became too much for me. I fled North in memory; I was just bursting for wide open spaces". This often-quoted passage succinctly illustrates McCahon's love of the New Zealand countryside: the artistic stimulation and refuge that it provided him. All of this is evidently present in the scumbled clarity of Northland. Colin McCahon quoted in Gordon Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist (rev. ed.), 1993, p. 99-100. Ibid, p. 95.