One
1965, Snthetic polymer paint on hardboard, 607 x 607 mm

Colin John McCahon (1919, Timaru, New Zealand - 1987, Auckland)
was a prominent New Zealand artist. During his life he also worked in art galleries and as a university lecturer. Some of McCahon's best-known works are wall-sized paintings with a dark background, overlaid with religious texts in white and varying in size, for example, Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is, 1958/59. He was also an extensive landscape painter, inspired in part by the writings of New Zealand geologist Sir Charles A. Cotton. With Toss Woollaston he is credited with introducing modernism to New Zealand art in the early twentieth century. (From Wikipedia)

Six days in Nelson and Canterbury
1950, Oil on canvas, 885 x 1165 mm

Colin McCahon is widely recognised as New Zealand’s foremost painter. Over 45 years, his work encompassed many themes, subjects and styles, from landscape to figuration to abstraction and an innovative use of painted text. His adaption of aspects of modernist painting to a specific local situation and his intense engagement with spiritual matters, mark him out as a distinctive figure in twentieth-century art.

Colin John McCahon was born in Timaru on 1 August 1919. He showed an early interest in art which was stimulated by the work of his maternal grandfather, photographer and painter William Ferrier, as well as regular visits to exhibitions.

As a teenager McCahon attended Russell Clark’s Saturday art classes, before enrolling at the Dunedin School of Art (1937–39), where Robert N. Field proved an inspirational teacher. He first exhibited his works at the Otago Art Society in 1939. In 1942, McCahon married fellow artist Anne Hamblett (1915–1993). The couple went on to have four children.

At the beginning of World War II McCahon worked in prescribed industries in support of the war effort. Later he travelled around the South Island getting seasonal work, leaving his family at home. His work from this time reflects the places he went to, particularly the Nelson region.
McCahon’s first mature works, religious paintings and symbolic landscapes such as The Angel of the Annunciation, Takaka: Night and Day, and The Promised Land, emerged in the years immediately after the war.

The Angel of the Announciation
1947, Oil on cardboard, 647 x 521 mm

In 1960 the family moved to a house in central Auckland, and in August 1964 McCahon resigned from the Auckland City Art Gallery to take up a position as a lecturer in painting at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. He taught there for six years, influencing a generation of artists.
During the 1960s McCahon was increasingly successful in having his work shown and recognised both in New Zealand and internationally. In January 1971 he left Elam to paint full-time.
The 1970s were richly productive years for McCahon, with numerous exhibitions. A second retrospective of his work was presented at Auckland City Art Gallery in 1972 (the first, a joint exhibition with Toss Woollaston, was held in 1963).

However by the late 1970s McCahon’s health was deteriorating because of his long-term alcoholism, and by the mid-1980s he was suffering from dementia. In 1984 the exhibition I Will Need Words was presented as part of the Biennale of Sydney, but McCahon was barely able to appreciate his growing international reputation. He died in Auckland Hospital on 27 May 1987.
Auckland City Art Gallery presented another retrospective the following year, Colin McCahon: Gates and Journeys. Further major exhibitions, both in New Zealand and overseas, have followed.