McCahon's Signwriting

A DigitalNZ Story by Courtney Johnston

McCahon's word paintings need to be viewed in two ways. You need to read and understand them as texts. The texts are carefully chosen, for specific reasons. But they are also carefully painted. They need to be seen and understood as paintings, as visual objects. And after a while, you learnt to slip between these two approaches of looking and reading, and reach a new point of feeling yourself into the paintings that allows you to do both at once. The written works come from many places. From speech bubbles in cartoons and advertising (most famously the lettering encased in a bubble shape on the Rinso soap flakes packet). From hand-lettered signs on roadside fruit and vegetable markets. From the devotional hand-painted posters used by Toss Woollaston's uncle Frank Tosswill to explain his religious theories, that McCahon saw pinned up in Woollaston's house in the 1930s and 1940s. And from, perhaps most famously, a visual encounter when McCahon was just a child, which in his self-mythologising way he recorded decades later. 'Once when I was quite young – we were still living on Highgate and hadn’t yet shifted to Prestwick Street – I had a few days of splendour. Two new shops had been built next door, one was Mrs McDonald’s Fruit Shop and Dairy, the other was taken by a hairdresser arid tobacconist. Mrs McDonald had her window full of fruit and other practical items. The hairdresser had his window painted with HAIRDRESSER AND TOBACCONIST. Painted in gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold, with shadows, and a feeling of being projected right through the glass and across the pavement. I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting. The grace of the lettering as it arched across the window in gleaming gold, suspended on its dull red field but leaping free from its own black shadow pointed to a new and magnificent world of painting. I watched from outside as the artist working inside slowly separated himself from me (and light from dark) to make his new creation.' [Colin McCahon, ‘Beginnings’, Landfall 80, vol. 20, no. 4, December 1966]