44 LISTENER AUGUST 3 2019
C
olin McCahon is said, by
those who know him, to be a
modest man, yet his paint-
ings are often vast, both in
size and impact. He has been
referred to as New Zealand’s
only major
painter, and as a prophet in
our midst, yet he is reluc-
tant to talk about his work
and lives in seclusion. His
paintings now cover a span
of 40 years.
He lives, with his wife,
Anne, in a very ordinary
house in a rather run-down
area of Auckland. His four
children have all grown up
and left home. I visited one
evening. Although it was
mid-summer, it had been
raining for weeks. The front door was
open and McCahon was standing there
looking at the sky. The light was strange
and striking, and many times during the
evening he would get up and walk down
the hall to look out the open front door.
The first surprise is to find that he
is such a slight, frail-looking man. His
manner is lively and shy at the same time.
He took me through into the back room,
where Anne was sitting. We sat down.(It is hard to get started, I am looking
around the room taking it all in – a large
sculpture of a strange-looking cross on the
mantelpiece, a tiny scrap of paper with a
miniature painting on it pinned up, peb-
bles, piles of books, papers, unpretentious
furniture ...)
I began by asking him
why he didn’t like talk-
ing about his paintings.
I felt that was probably a
mistake, as he took a long
time to reply. He said that
it was really because he
didn’t have anything he
wanted to say about them,
that once he had finished
painting them, he really
lost interest, that he hardly
even looked at them.
I wondered if he felt that
using words to describe his paintings lim-
ited them, interpreted them in a particular
way, and he agreed. He went on to say
that many of the explanations of his work
and his influences offered up by art critics
he found quite incredible. Anne thought
so, too, and it was obvious they felt quite
strongly about this. He said that it was all
right with him, that that was their thing,
that it was interesting, but that often art
critics seemed to be attempting to showOur modernist
master
This rare interview with Colin McCahon,
by Sheridan Keith, ran in the May 17,
1980, Listener, towards the end of the
celebrated painter’s career. McCahon’s
centennial year starts on August 1, his
birthday, and is being marked with
exhibitions and events around the country.
their own cleverness. Anyway, he felt that
it was all quite irrelevant to him, and to
his work.
I asked how he painted. He said that
he worked in “painting periods” duringBooks & Culture
May His Light Shine (Tau Cross): one of the last
landscapes of urban Auckland by McCahon,
pictured at left in 1961.