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February 1, 2009
Colin McCahon has appeared on junk for code before. As pointed before he is recognized as one of New Zealand’s foremost modernist painters. He differed from the general practice of other New Zealand painters and contemporary photographers in that he did not use New Zealand's landscape merely for its splendid pictorial beauty.
Many of his regional North Otago landscapes have been simplified down to almost bare unadorned shapes; abstractions that I find visually appealing:
Colin McCahon, North Otago landscape , 1967
However, McCahon's writings indicate that he did not subscribe to the formalist purity of non-figurative abstraction.
Colin McCahon, North Otago landscape, 1969
If the landscape is a recurring theme in the McCahon's work, McCahon viewed the landscape as having spiritual qualities and by the 1940s characteristically represented it laid bare and stripped back to its essential geological elements.
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