McCahon, Light & Waterfalls

A DigitalNZ Story by Courtney Johnston

A fall of light dividing the darkness is a common symbol in McCahon's works from the 1960s onwards. The motif arose from McCahon's study of paintings by William Hodges, the official artist onboard Cook's 1772-75 voyage to the Pacific. A small group of Hodges' paintings were shown at Auckland City Art Gallery in 1959, when McCahon was working there, and he developed a deep connection with the earlier painter, later saying 'The waterfalls started flowing in 1964 and there were hundreds of them. They grew out of William Hodges' paintings on loan to the Auckland City Art Gallery from the Admiralty, London. Hodges and I eventually realised we were friends over the years and got talking about his painting. He was dead and I was about the same. We conversed through paint (about Naples yellow to start with) - and in 1964 I painted my first waterfall.' The work by Hodges that particularly interested McCahon was 'Waterfall in Dusky Bay, New Zealand', a large dramatic painting in which a Maori family is depicted against a romanticised landscape, centred on a foaming waterfall that tumbles from the darkness of the bush to break over a group of large boulders, throwing off a rainbow that encircles the figures. The waterfall extended as motif - light breaking through the darkness - as the years passed. McCahon's exquisite 1966 'Fourteen Stations of the Cross' exemplifies this - an abstract painting that, seen in this way, is also about Christian belief, human suffering, resurrection, and the land that surrounds us. As McCahon told his biographer Gordon Brown, 'waterfalls fell and raged and became as still silent falls of light for a long time. I look back with joy on taking a brush of white paint and curving through the darkness with a line of white.' Light separating good and evil, light illuminating doubt, light bringing hope, light asserting I AM ...