Journey into artist's heartland

Gordon Brown's Portrait of Colin McCahon. Photo / Ian McDonald

In late 1948, while he was painting some of the most sublime of the series that has become known as his "early religious works" - paintings teeming with visions of angels and religious mysteries set in the contemporary New Zealand landscape - Colin McCahon moved into a small rented house behind the railway lines in Linwood, Christchurch.

Life was hard. His biographer, Gordon Brown (whose collected essays on McCahon have been published as Towards a Promised Land, its title taken from an early landscape work described by McCahon as "a dream painting of my life in Nelson"), recounts his first meeting with McCahon there in 1952, when, as a first-year art student armed with a letter of introduction from James K. Baxter, he biked around one evening.

The grim setting, as Brown describes it, could have been painted by Lowry, the street illuminated by a battery of lamps perched on "a giant metal beanstalk": "Although it was barely dusk, the whole area was brightly lit; the encroaching light from the yard invaded the surrounding neighbourhood, day and night. Thick blankets were hung across windows at night to shut out its prying monstrous eye. Trains rumbled by; or were shunted - clang, bang; smoke, soot, dust and grime swirled, often clouding the lamps' beam; sulphurous fumes and the eroding effect of noise rudely broke into conversations."

In Linwood, at night and in the weekends, to the music of the rumbling trains, McCahon painted with deep, jewel-like colours like those of a Byzantine mosaic. He produced works which have become some of the most significant paintings in our art history - visual documents of the growing national consciousness at mid-century.

As Brown recounts, the achievement is even more noteworthy given that during this period McCahon's improvised easel was the back of a couch in the lounge; one of the most fascinating essays in Brown's collection details the effects of various studios on the scale and nature of McCahon's work.

He also often used paints he'd mixed up himself from raw pigment and linseed oil. War-time restrictions meant New Zealand's limited supply of artists' materials was allocated to individual artists by the art societies; if an artist was out of step with the conservative arts hierarchy, as McCahon and his friend Toss Woollaston were, it could prove difficult to get paint.

Gordon Brown's book is full of such colourful detail. Several essays started life as talks and lectures, and there is often the sense the writer is pausing the narrative for a moment to make a pertinent aside to his audience. (Brown's discursive footnotes are worth a close read in themselves.) Brown was a friend of McCahon for more than 30 years, and his knowledge of the work and the circumstances of its production is encyclopaedic.

Drawn both from his keen observation and from private conversations with McCahon, Brown's reflections shed a warm light both on the work and the person: a nuanced human portrait of the artist struggling to communicate his powerful vision in paint. Although Brown's previous writings on McCahon are well-known and authoritative, there are many surprises here: I was particularly astounded to learn of McCahon's lengthy involvement with theatre - the artist spent a season in 1938 touring with a vaudeville troupe, acting as a "general rouseabout" and occasionally as a "dirty comedian".

This is a long way from the popular image of McCahon as "dour god botherer" - to quote Paul Swadel, the director of the recent documentary on his life and work.

Brown's carefully balanced histories add extra body to the stories of even well-known works. Next time I view Tomorrow will be the same but not as this is, for example, the painting that caused such an uproar in the late 1950s when it was acquired for the Christchurch Art Gallery, I will be thinking of Brown's account of McCahon losing his temper with the unfinished work ("I hurled a whole lovely quart tin of black Dulux at the board and reconstructed the painting out of the mess"), the resulting puddle of black paint dribbling through the floorboards of his studio and into the ceiling of his sons' bedroom underneath.

Brown offers a formal analysis of many works, detailing the way McCahon built up his compositions and the manner in which the elements of a painting relate to one another. ("These dark smudges become a vital balancing factor in the overall design.") It's not the kind of art history you see very often these days, more's the pity: knowing how an artist makes their works adds a valuable dimension to the experience of a work of art.

Brown, originally an artist, comes from a generation when artists - and poets - wrote on other artists' works. His analyses of McCahon's painterly processes could stand as a model for the value of such an approach to younger art writers.

Beautifully written and personally engaging, Towards a Promised Land is also a serious book by one of New Zealand's pre-eminent senior art historians.

It's likely to prove an essential resource for the contemporary art world. Brown covers a lot of ground, including the significance of words and numbers in McCahon's practice; the pleasure McCahon took in the craft of painting; his relationship with Woollaston; and the influence of the geomorphologist C.A. Cotton in McCahon's depiction of the New Zealand landscape.

This is generous, thorough, painstaking scholarship which provides the basis for many future conjectures: Brown has tracked down, for example, the art books which McCahon read at the Dunedin Public Library in the 1930s, likely influences on his subsequent work.

Brown has updated his earlier writings with information and reflections, some of which he was unable to record during McCahon's lifetime.

The overall impression Brown gives of McCahon is of a restless voyager and seeker, a painter of journeys through the landscape towards spiritual understanding.

One of his essays quotes McCahon's observation that the promised land is the place "where the painter never arrives". We are fortunate to have had Brown tracking him over the long years of that journey.

Lara Strongman is a Christchurch-based art historian.