The attraction of art

What is it about a piece of art that holds your gaze and pulls you back time and again? In a new book, Look This Way, 17 writers answer that question by writing about an NZ artist. In this edited extract, C K Stead writes about Colin McCahon.

My introduction to "Modern" (ie abstract) painting was in the early 1950s, my first years at university, when I went about with Diane, daughter of French-born Louise Henderson.

It was during this period that I first heard about Colin McCahon.

My view of his work was influenced by Louise who, though she respected him as a force and was grateful for his support, felt, I think, that his work was inclined to be heavy-handed, lacking finesse. My view had also been influenced by some reproductions of his work in early issues of Landfall. These included The Angel of the Annunciation and The King of the Jews (both 1947), works done in a style somewhere between Georges Rouault and a classic comic. Since all the distinction these paintings possess, at least for this viewer, is in the richness of their colour (involving at once boldness, vivid contrasts and often gradations within a single colour), it can hardly have been a favour to McCahon, nor enhanced his reputation, to reproduce them, as Landfall did, in a muddy black and white.

I spent most of four years, from early 1956, outside New Zealand, returning at the end of 1959. By this time Peter Tomory was in charge of the Auckland Art Gallery where McCahon had established a place for himself. What I remember most vividly from this period is the shock of seeing some or all of his Elias paintings, and then the Gate series, including his homage to Mondrian. At once my feelings about him changed. I could measure this by the fact that I now wanted very much to own one of his works. I remember also, however, a certain nervousness, not only because we had come back from overseas with next to nothing, so the idea of buying a painting seemed an extravagance, but also because this was repressive mid-century New Zealand when it was still possible to have a member of the city council complaining that a work by Barbara Hepworth bought by the Auckland Art Gallery looked like "a cow's buttock", and when anything at all by McCahon was fair game for public ridicule.

Over the next two decades Colin McCahon became, for me, simply a part of the intellectual and artistic life of Auckland, someone I knew reasonably well, saw at not infrequent intervals, whose shows I attended and whose work I admired a colleague, a friend of friends. He worked at the art gallery. He taught for a time at Elam. He worked with Chris Cathcart and Frank Sargeson on set designs and handbills for Frank's plays. He painted a mural in Maurice Shadbolt's studio at Titirangi. I thought of him as sombre, inward, warily determined, but there was also something charming and innocent about him.

It was through the lawyer Peter Williams and the Howard League for Penal Reform that I became briefly involved in visiting long-term prisoners in Mt Eden jail. Twice I accompanied Colin to visit the lifer Ronald Jorgensen (of the Bassett Road machine-gun murders) who was attempting to develop his talent as a painter. I saw my role only as encourager and conversationalist. I remember telling Jorgensen, through the screen that separated us, that his painting of a coat hanging on a peg on the back of a door was "very good"; and then how fatuous that seemed as I listened to Colin analysing the picture, giving Ron exact advice about what he was doing well and (mainly) what he was doing badly.

Colin at this time was expanding his range beyond landscapes, and the Elias paintings were among the first to display what was to become a central aspect of his work the use of texts, mainly biblical, as material, or subjects. I became a complete convert to these paintings while remaining relatively indifferent to the messages they carried which means I was probably not the kind of admirer Colin was happiest with. For him, the words were of critical importance. Yet the fact that I could have so positive a response, while hardly noticing the "message" (who was Elias? I had no idea), is an indicator of what I think must be unarguable that the power came, not from "story", or text, but from the use of paint, the application of colour, the filling and balancing of spaces.

Colin had a studio now at Muriwai on Auckland's west coast, and was learning the landscapes of the north, which I thought of as my New Zealand. The first McCahon I bought was one of his Helensville series done in 1968 a pale sky, a severe dark green landscape with a wide area of black shadow between foreground and horizon. The sky glares; the land frowns but doesn't blink just absorbs the glare, darkly. Colin described this region as "shockingly beautiful", but added that it was the area the Maori spirits passed over on their way from life to death, and that he "didn't recommend it as a tourist resort".

My next purchase followed soon after. In October 1969 Colin displayed a series of works done on rolls of wallpaper, each with a text. He called the series Written Paintings and Drawings, but they have become known as his "Scrolls". I bought one within minutes of seeing it a text in its New English Bible version: "All mortals are like grass, all their splendour like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower falls away. But the word of the Lord endures for evermore."

The words mainly in black with red shadows, or echoes, and one crucial word, "Lord", in red seem to hang in the air above an orange-reddish desert landscape. Here I can't pretend to be indifferent to the text, nor to the fact that I see the landscape as biblical. But still the magic of the painting, its inexplicable character, has everything to do with colour and space, and in particular with the way the landscape seems to recede without reaching sky or horizon, as if we were looking down on it from a great altitude a God's-eye view; and the words are magically imprinted, in Colin's unmistakable hand, as if on an intervening glass.

In 1976 I won the New Zealand Book Award for poetry. The prize was $1000, and I went to Colin's next show, Rocks in the Sky, intending to buy a painting. They were $450 each and I bought two. They were compositions of the numbers 1 to 14 (sometimes Arabic, sometimes Roman) against an abstract Muriwai landscape and seascape. There was a lot of black and white, dark and light, glare and shadow, laid out predominantly in horizontal lines which is what you see looking westward on that coast. I confess to my ignorance at the time of the fact that the numbers represented the Stations of the Cross, but I recall thinking that the number 1, sometimes entombed below ground, at others rising into the heavens, represented Christ, or Colin, or more likely both C suffering, C triumphant.

My first and determining response, however, was intuitive, not analytical. That I could see landscape/seascape was part of the experience, but it was not, for me, its end or object. And as for the numbers they were arcana. They were mystery. They were the presence of the artist Colin being Colin permitting me to be myself in what I made of them.

There was one work in this series, the one I liked best and bought immediately, that was not black and white. Working down from the top of the picture: the sky is dark overhead but the number 1 is up there in an orange box distinct, declaring itself, absolute. Across the middle of the picture there is a broad orange strip, suggesting the setting sun glaring out, as it can do on that coast, under the black brows of cloud. The near-to-middle distance is (as I see it) dark sea, echoing the dark cloud. And in the immediate foreground there is another horizontal section, this in paler orange and containing the numbers 8 to 14. I have heard or read that this foreground is an abstraction from one of Muriwai's lagoons and perhaps it is. But because it is cut off so emphatically and squarely I see it as part of a human structure a veranda rail, for example, over which the artist is looking out at the sea and sky.

Why (possibly uniquely in this series) are Stations 2 to 7 missing? My guess is that they were meant to go across the orange band I've interpreted as a sunset, and that that band, as it was done, looked too vivid, too strong just as it was, to be spoiled by numbers. If that should be right, it's a case of instinct winning out over intention. Also, 1 followed by 2 would have been unambiguously the numeral. Isolated as it is in the picture, and painted as a single stroke, the number 1 can as easily be read as the capital letter I, first-person singular, precursor to the big I AM.

In 1973 I had a note from Colin telling me an essay I had written about James K Baxter was "so real I jumped for joy". Along the bottom of the note he wrote in his big lettering, "GOD, IT WAS GOOD". Then he added a postscript about my suggestion that Baxter's Christian theology was turning, at the last, into Zen Buddhism: "The Lord, or God," Colin wrote, "is found in the end only and reality. Tough tough hard and beautiful all the time. As the body dies God is discovered. I find I can take it all really. Finally."

Colin was not humourless, but it's proper to acknowledge that the deft touches, the wit, the (to borrow Julian Barnes's adjectives) "playful, companionable" aspects of 20th-century modernism, were outside his range, or his interests. That postscript is moving in its way intense, serious, high-minded, typical of Colin in life and in all his work. It is also slightly incoherent; and by the time it was written everyone who knew him knew that alcohol, which had always been something of a "necessary protection", was beginning to do serious damage.

The last time I saw him must have been a year or two before his death in 1987. I had heard that he was no longer able to paint. He was in the street in Parnell (Auckland), wearing trousers that were too short for him, and pink socks. He knew that he knew me, and that there was reason for goodwill, but I suspect could no longer remember why or in what connection. His smile was innocent and seraphic.

I don't suppose it was typical of his last years (or perhaps it was), but all the wariness and pain seemed to be gone.