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CHAPTER 1
SOUTHERN BEGINNINGS, 1919–36
'I was very lucky and grew up knowing I would be a painter. I never had any doubts about this.' So Colin McCahon wrote in his autobiographical notes for the catalogue of Colin McCahon: A Survey (1972) – the largest exhibition of his work held during his lifetime. The passage continues: 'I knew it as a very small boy and I knew it later. I know it now when it is too late to turn back and I only wish I were a better painter.' Evident here is the strong sense of direction and continuity, and the striving to do better, which his life as a painter displayed from beginning to end.
Family background and environment
McCahon's certainty about his vocation was undoubtedly stimulated by the art-friendly environment into which he was born. His maternal grandfather, William Ferrier, was a professional photographer and amateur painter; his parents, Ethel and John McCahon, were gallery-attending art enthusiasts who encouraged their precocious son's ability by exposing him to exhibitions, books and painting lessons. His mother recalled Colin's gifted manual prowess as a child: 'at the age of eight, he could do two drawings simultaneously, one with each hand'.
Colin John McCahon was born on 1 August 1919 in Timaru, on the Pacific coast of the South Island, where his mother, Ethel (née Ferrier), had grown up; she had returned from Dunedin where she and her husband were living to her parents' house for the birth of her second child. Colin had an older sister, Beatrice, a teacher (born 1918), and a younger brother, Jim, a scientist (born 1921).
Colin's father, John Kernohan McCahon (1884–1963), the youngest in a large family, was a businessman (commercial traveller, company manager) of Irish Protestant descent who during Colin's youth was manager of Austin Motors in Dunedin. Writing to his Wellington dealer, Peter McLeavey, Colin once reported that his father had travelled with a future brother-in-law to North America and Europe before World War I and that he was the only boy in his family: '8 girls & then poor father. All the sisters married "well" – Father married a poor painter-photographer's daughter.' Several of his McCahon relatives, according to this letter, were 'in the medical business ... Another aunt of mine was the first – or near first – school doctor in N.Z. She was small & Irish dark ...'. Colin's parents married in 1915. He always addressed them in letters as 'Mother' and 'Father' which suggests a middle-class home environment and customs as compared to most New Zealanders' more common 'Mum' and 'Dad'.
Ethel Beatrice McCahon (1888–1973), Colin's mother, was of largely Scottish descent, her father being Edinburgh-born William Ferrier (1855–1922) who came to New Zealand with his widowed father David, a bookseller, as a fourteen-year-old in 1869; William's mother, Catherine Lowe (daughter of a Congregational minister), was also Scottish-born. In 1886 in Oamaru, William married Eva Beatrice Cunninghame (c. 1863–1946, known to her McCahon grandchildren as 'Gaggie'), fourth child of Sarah and Thomas Cunninghame. Active in the Wesleyan Church and superintendent of the Sunday school, Thomas was treasurer and town clerk of Oamaru, a native of Dublin in Ireland who came to New Zealand in 1878; his wife Sarah died at forty-six in 1884.
William Ferrier established a photographic business in Timaru in 1881 (he had previously worked in studios in Christchurch and Oamaru, where presumably he met his wife, Eva); he was also a competent amateur painter in oils and watercolours. William and Eva Ferrier had eight children, after one of whom Colin was named – Gilbert Colin Cunninghame Ferrier, an engineer and bridge designer, who was training in England to be an architect when World War I war broke out. He was a second lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers, and was killed at Ypres, Belgium, in 1914 aged twenty-four. Within the family, Colin was thought to have inherited his uncle's talents. Colin's ethnic inheritance was therefore largely Celtic – Irish on his father's side, largely Scottish on his mother's – with active Protestants in both families.
McCahon later wrote about his maternal grandparents' house in Timaru in the essay he contributed to the series 'Beginnings' in Landfall in 1966:
My grandfather William Ferrier was both a photographer and a landscape painter in water colour. We grew up with his paintings on the walls, and at holiday times visiting my Grandmother's house at Timaru (I don't think I ever met my Grandfather) we lived in rooms hung floor to ceiling with water colours and prints. Once, suffering from mumps, I think it was, I spent a time confined to bed in what had been my Grandfather's dark room: red glass in the window, and paints and brushes, a palette, in shallow drawers. ... [A]nd so it was that having met the 'finished' work both in Timaru and Dunedin I now met the sacred materials of 'art'.
Colin may not have remembered his grandfather – he died at sixty-seven (the same age that Colin died) in 1922 – but he certainly 'met' him, since his photograph as an infant was taken by William Ferrier; throughout his life he took a lively interest in his grandfather's work, acquiring copies of various published portfolios of photographs of Timaru and Mount Cook and environs, and often mentioning in letters details he came across about his grandfather's career.
School days in Dunedin and Oamaru
After Colin's birth, Ethel and John McCahon returned to Dunedin where they lived first at 288 Highgate, a long street on the western hills above North Dunedin, and later – after they returned from a temporary move to Oamaru in 1930–31 – at 24 Prestwick Street, Maori Hill, less than 2 kilometres away. Colin attended Maori Hill School from the ages of five to ten (1924–29).
McCahon gave revealing insights into his early schooling in a 1981 essay recalling three teachers who taught him in standards one, two and three at Maori Hill School. Their relevance to his future justifies fairly extensive quotation. In the infant classes Colin suffered an early experience of rejection for not conforming as expected, being left-handed: 'I was a left-hander who couldn't write as the teacher required. I had been battered to utter misery and exhaustion, bashed with straps, held hostage in front of the class, or made to stand up for ridicule on the desk top.'
Somehow I had moved on to standard one, where a lady floated like a waterlily into the room and into my life. She was as lovely as she looked. She came, I think, from Lumsden, and was named Miss Loudon. She worked hard, and got me going. I fell in love and, for my loved one, worked well. I was happy at last and thankful for her care and attention.
A pattern of rejection and acceptance would be recurrent in his life as a painter.
Then Miss Wishart ... [C]oming back to school at the beginning of February, I met a very 'with it' lady, standing beside a large black cat and witch's cauldron bubbling over an open fire – on the blackboard ... She had short hair (dyed red?) and was reputed to have come from the art school in Christchurch!
The cat was her mind opener and then, BANG into lively arithmetic! All talked and then worked and BANG into story and poetry! Tennyson, Wordsworth, struggling with the moderns, and wonderful exercises in formal English spelling. You never knew what was happening to you. Poetry – words – words and pictures – and music – and grabbing it all. A year of joy, and at the end of this happiness, the awful threat of 'Miss Guy' the ogre of Maori Hill School – and me moving on there next year.
... She was a tough lady and a relentless teacher ... Her real subject, as I look back, was 'order' – the order of thinking, looking and living. The glamour was over and, with it, the horror of the infant school ... But now came the relentless Miss Guy who taught me to understand that the only way to put all the information I had together was by my own hard work.
Miss Guy was my most real angel.
The following year we moved to Oamaru and I went to Waitaki Boys' Junior High, and cleaned up the standard five prize list – for Miss Loudon, Miss Wishart and Miss Guy.
Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 14-1928, bequeathed 1928 by Mr J. C. Marshall
Betty Wishart (1909–1990) was also an artist and occasional broadcaster. Several of these details point distinctly towards McCahon's future. Arithmetic (numbers) and 'Poetry – words – words and pictures – music' – were all increasingly vital to his artistic project. Years later he told Patricia France: 'Poetry, before painting, is my friend. The one without the other can't exist.' He continued quoting poetry (including Tennyson), and using it in his paintings, all his life. Also, there is the emphasis on hard work and 'the order of thinking, looking and living'; again, all central to his mature aesthetic and practice. For example, he once told poet and editor Charles Brasch (1909–1973): 'This is where I am trying to go. Away from hysteria into order & value & reality. The other is so half way. Bach rather than Beethoven. Cézanne than Van Gogh.'
McCahon's early interest in art was stimulated by regularly attending exhibitions of the Otago Art Society (OAS), of which his parents were members, and at Dunedin Public Art Gallery (DPAG). He wrote in 'Beginnings':
We were a gallery-going family and went to all the exhibitions. At this time the big artistic event of the Dunedin year was the large Otago Art Society exhibition held in the Early Settlers' Hall. When you are young and in love with paint and with painting even inferior paintings become proper food. ... The Dunedin Art Gallery offered a Russell Flint, a female nude with swirling draperies called 'The Banner Dance'; ... a Laura Knight; and others. ... There was one painting in the Gallery I loved above all else, Frances Hodgkins's 'Summer'. It sang from the wall, warm and beautiful, beautiful faces beaming from summer blossoms. It was strong and kind and lovely. When we shifted to Oamaru (it was when I was in Standard 4 at school), I took that picture with me in my mind and painted myself my own version.
Russell Flint (1880–1969), a Scottish painter, specialised in female nudes. Laura Knight (1877–1970), a popular English painter, was well known for paintings of gypsies, children and dancers; the DPAG owned three of her works in the 1930s, including an oil, Italian Peasants Dancing (c. 1928). Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947), who knew Laura Knight (she visited the New Zealander's studio in St Ives in 1917), had of course grown up in Dunedin and achieved recognition overseas. McCahon would later become actively involved in defending Hodgkins against conservative and parochial reaction in the celebrated Pleasure Garden affair in Christchurch in 1948 (discussed in Chapter Three) and he was involved in curating several exhibitions of her work at Auckland City Art Gallery in the 1950s.
In 'Beginnings' Colin recalled a significant event which must have occurred before 1929 when he turned ten and can be read as a kind of originating myth for the artist:
Once when I was quite young – we were still living on Highgate and hadn't yet shifted to Prestwick Street – I had a few days of splendour. Two new shops had been built next door, one was Mrs McDonald's Fruit Shop and Dairy, the other was taken by a hairdresser and tobacconist. ... The hairdresser had his window painted with HAIRDRESSER AND TOBACCONIST. Painted in gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold, with shadows, and a feeling of being projected right through the glass and across the pavement. I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting. The grace of the lettering ... pointed to a new and magnificent world of painting. I watched from outside as the artist working inside slowly separated himself from me (and light from dark) to make his new creation. Following this, I did a lot of signwriting.
Gordon Brown has warned against taking McCahon's autobiographical statements too literally, due to his 'habit of telescoping events, facts, observations and ideas until his text is multi-layered ... and conditioned by his own perception of how he saw himself'. Brown's comment may be relevant to this passage. As an account of the beginnings of an artist for whom words were vital and the separation of light from dark paramount, it is perhaps almost too good to be true, though nonetheless revealing even if it contains elements of self-mythologising. In a sense McCahon remained a 'sign writer' throughout his career.
At Waitaki Boys' Junior High School in Oamaru in 1930–31, attended when the family temporarily relocated to the small coastal city some 100 kilometres north of Dunedin, Colin's teacher encouraged his enthusiasm for painting and sign-writing. He mentions this in a letter to his father: 'On Thursday at art I made a poster for the art display for parents day, and Miss Edgar pasted it on a piece of black paper to stick up somewhere in the school. She said that it was very good because no other was done like it.' The pride the twelve-year-old felt at this recognition is palpable. He remembered her (though not her name) thirty-five years later:
At this time I had a good art teacher. She seemed old, perhaps she wasn't, had faded red hair and was encouraging. I don't know her name but she taught me for one grateful year at Waitaki Junior High School. We then returned to Dunedin and all too soon to the most unforgettable horror of my youth, that school for the unseeing, Otago Boys' High School.
McCahon looked back on his brief sojourn in Oamaru with pleasure, writing in 'Beginnings':
Oamaru was a fine place to be. There were school plays, Saturday mornings on the harbour dredge, rafts on the lagoon. I remember also a parachutist whose parachute failed to open and the white cross erected against the low North Otago hills where he fell. I have often used both the cross and these hills in later paintings. On trips to the Waitaki dam we passed this landscape.
North Otago first appears as a tile in McCahon's work in 1951 but it was in the mid-1960s after being in Auckland for more than a decade that he returned (both physically and in memory) to the North Otago landscape repeatedly, completing more than fifty paintings and prints with North Otago themes between 1966 and 1972, including a whole exhibition, North Otago Landscapes, at Barry Lett Galleries in 1967.
Teenage years
Back in Dunedin in 1932, as if in acknowledgement by his parents of the talent revealed in Oamaru, Colin was enrolled in Saturday-morning classes with the gifted artist and illustrator Russell Clark (1905–1966).
Soon after completing his training at the Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch, Clark was employed as a commercial artist by the printers and publishers John McIndoe Ltd in Dunedin (1929–38). He expanded a studio on McIndoe's premises to accommodate small classes. Colin attended Clark's classes in 1932–34, aged between thirteen and fifteen. A fellow student was the gifted artist Doris Lusk (1916–1990), who became a lifelong friend, encountered again later at the Dunedin School of Art. McCahon found Clark to be 'a splendid teacher'; he was impressed by his technical dexterity and by the valuable exercises he devised, especially one involving a pile of chalk boxes, useful for teaching his students the handling of volume and tone. Years later Colin gave similar exercises to his own students at Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland. Asked what he remembered of McCahon as a pupil, Clark wrote: 'I am unable to remember anything he produced in class but I can remember vividly the first watercolours he brought to show me. They were very unusual in approach and extremely interesting. We thought them very advanced in those days ...'. It is noteworthy that even as a teenager Colin's work was deemed 'advanced'.
Another family habit which proved important to the developing artist was regular attendance at the Dunedin Public Library (DPL), an institution that was well supplied with art books, due to a grant from the Carnegie Foundation, and especially after the appointment of the innovative Archie Dunningham (1907–1996) as librarian in 1933. In later years McCahon recalled how important the DPL had been to him in the 1930s. Discussing with his librarian friend Ron O'Reilly (1914–1982) the geomorphologist Charles Cotton, author of a classic book, Geomorphology, which greatly influenced Colin's understanding of the New Zealand landscape and subsequently his drawing and painting, McCahon recalled first coming across the book in the DPL and later being given a copy by his friend Patrick Hayman (1915–1982), a Jewish artist temporarily resident in New Zealand: 'You will remember Pat Hayman ... I talked to him about Cotton whose Geomorphology I'd met up with in the Dunedin Public Library – that invaluable place – Cotton, Cézanne, Bellini, Gauguin. Pat got us "Geomorphology" as a wedding present.' Cézanne, Bellini, Gauguin were all important early models. Much of Colin's self-education as an artist took place at the DPL. It is only appropriate that one of his greatest paintings, Otago Peninsula (1946–49), specifically painted for Rodney Kennedy, was gifted to the library by Kennedy.
Colin's teenage years were blighted by the unhappiness he experienced at Otago Boys' High School, which he attended from 1934 to 1936. Just why he found his time there an 'unforgettable horror' he never clarified beyond saying that he learned nothing of value there and developed 'a profound loathing for several of the masters', one of whom may have been a relative. When he was drafting 'Beginnings' for Landfall, the editor Brasch encouraged him to cut two verses he had quoted of the school song:
Above the city, lo she stands A proud and graceful hall The finest schools of other lands Pray take and keep them all.
We envy not their age, good lack Their fame we'll ne'er decry But from them all we turn us back To old Otago High. Etc.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Colin McCahon"
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Copyright © 2019 Peter Simpson.
Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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