In 1971, Colin McCahon moved into his studio at Muriwai and devoted himself to painting full-time. Previously, the financial precarity of making art had required him to undertake paid work alongside his painting practice. Correspondence between McCahon and his Wellington dealer, and friend, Peter McLeavey, provides unique details of this transitional period in McCahon’s practice in 1971, particularly McCahon’s careful attention to the exciting environmental conditions just outside his Muriwai studio: rain, sunshine, fertile land and turbulent weather. These conditions distracted McCahon from painting. Drawing on McCahon and McLeavey’s correspondence, this article highlights, upon cessation of paid work in 1971, the level of discomfort McCahon experienced from his desire to fill his newly free days with activities other than painting. McCahon struggled to identify whether distractions such as gardening and observational work were valuable and necessary to his painting process, which his 1971 exhibition View from the Top of the Cliff: An Exhibition of Watercolours by Colin McCahon indicates, or an early sign he was losing motivation. Although scholars have previously emphasised the difficulty of McCahon's working conditions prior to 1971, McCahon evidently could invoke restrictions and struggle over his painting process anywhere, at any time.

Colin McCahon, Peter McLeavey, watercolour, environmental conditions, correspondence

In 1971, Colin McCahon (1919–1987), already over 30 years into his prolific painting career, was able to work full-time as an artist for the first time. Finally receiving sufficient acclaim and the support of a steady buyer market, McCahon could leave his teaching role at Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts and confidently transition into painting full-time as his primary income.¹ During this period of transition, McCahon produced his rainbow-hued watercolour series, The view from the top of the cliff. These rapidly painted works on paper depict the view outside his studio at Muriwai Beach: swirling, hot sunsets over a turbulent ocean. These close, careful studies of weather, climate, and qualities of light over the Muriwai skyline were first exhibited at the gallery of McCahon’s friend and Wellington dealer Peter McLeavey in April 1971, titled View from the Top of the Cliff: An Exhibition of Watercolours by Colin McCahon.

For all the apparent energy manifested in these paintings, 1971 was a year of distractions for McCahon. That year, McCahon became increasingly aware of how his practice was changing and of the new distractions that were occupying his time.² He was in regular contact with McLeavey as he worked towards The view from the top of the cliff exhibition. The two began corresponding in 1968, although McLeavey had shown McCahon’s paintings as early as 1966 (arranged via telephone).³ By 1971, confident in the intimacy and honesty of their friendship, McCahon wrote openly to McLeavey of his worries for his career: his fluctuating motivation to paint and his growing desire to garden and stand looking out over Muriwai.⁴ McCahon’s relationship with McLeavey appears to have been an important point of contact as he steadied himself in new routines. Throughout 1971, McLeavey was party to McCahon’s inner dialogue of distractions from painting and possibly came to realise that they were a part of McCahon’s process he could not leave behind. Drawing on visual and archival evidence, this article uncovers the distractions McCahon encountered, or possibly manufactured, in his new studio environment at Muriwai. From this evidence, this article proposes that distractions were a key part of McCahon’s practice in 1971: a necessary device for holding his nerve when his motivation to paint fluctuated and for re-energising his practice via inspiration found in the environmental conditions surrounding his studio.

Although McCahon had been making art since the late 1930s, paid work in other forms had previously occupied most of his waking hours. From seasons of manual labour on apple, tobacco, and hop orchards around the Nelson region in the 1930s and 40s, to several positions at Auckland City Art Gallery (now Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) between 1953 and 1964, and finally lecturing at Elam from 1964 until 1971, painting was slotted in around more traditional forms of paid work.⁵ Prior to 1971, the conditions in which McCahon painted were limiting: initially a studio-cum-storeroom in his parents’ Dunedin home; haphazard set-ups in the common areas of various flats, with furniture redeployed as easels; the dark garage of his Titirangi home in the 1950s; and his constantly interrupted studio space at Elam art school.⁶

The difficult conditions of McCahon’s early painting career take on an almost mythological status in the scholarship of Gordon H. Brown and Peter Simpson, in which McCahon is presented as a man unstoppably eager to paint.⁷ Whether this was a narrative McCahon intended to uphold is debatable, but details of the difficulties he encountered in his practice were of interest and often provided to the public.⁸ In the catalogue for his monumental 1972 exhibition at Auckland City Art Gallery, Colin McCahon: A Survey Exhibition, McCahon provided the following statement about his practice:

“At night I paint under a very large incandescent light bulb. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I am only now, and slowly, becoming able to paint in the mornings. After a lifetime of working – farming, factories, gardening, teaching, the years at Auckland City Art Gallery – I find it hard to paint in the world’s usual work-time. It can be difficult to accept that painting is still work.”⁹

This passage is often used by scholars to summarise the difficult conditions in which McCahon painted up until 1971.¹⁰ In this telling, 1971 is the year McCahon’s practice flourished, no longer restricted by “a lifetime of working”. Instead, this article argues that McCahon still saw his practice as a site of struggle in 1971.¹¹ Even after a lifetime of paid work limiting his painting, as he described in the exhibition catalogue, as a full-time painter he was still finding it “hard to paint” in a normal routine or a routine that felt sufficiently like work.¹²

In 1971, McCahon’s painting conditions appeared prime: a purpose-built studio space inside a prefabricated industrial shed on his wife Anne’s (née Hamblett) family property at Muriwai, stretches of uninterrupted time, and abundant views of the ocean, hills, and surrounding flora.¹³ However, McCahon’s letters to McLeavey in 1971 suggest he found the newly unrestricted nature of his working conditions unexpectedly repressive. Unlike the struggle of fitting painting around paid work, ample time and resources applied a different kind of pressure: a sense of total ownership and control over the rhythms of his practice.

Accordingly, McCahon identified new obstacles to his artistic production. In his letters to McLeavey, McCahon regularly confessed his shortcomings, particularly that he was often distracted by the environmental conditions around his studio. If painting against the back of a couch or in the dark of a garage was a certain kind of challenge, the draw of working the fertile coastal land or looking out at the colourful skies just outside his studio was too.¹⁴ McCahon continued to invoke a sense of struggle around the conditions of his practice by identifying new distractions from painting, recreating something of the restriction he had experienced when holding other paid work. Throughout this article, I refer to these restrictions of rain, sunshine, and changing weather as distractions. This choice of terminology is not intended to undermine or trivialise McCahon’s process but to recognise how McCahon himself characterised environmental conditions in his letters to McLeavey. Although not inherently negative, they distracted him from what he felt he really should be doing: rapidly producing more work.

When writing to McLeavey, weather was a central topic for McCahon, whose painting routine, pace, and ultimately success were not insular to him or his studio but deeply affected by external environmental factors. To demonstrate to McLeavey the significant influence of environmental conditions on his painting process, McCahon’s letters allocate a certain agency to bouts of rain and sunshine that interrupted his focus: rain, a frustrating distraction; and sunshine, a more pleasurable one.

Rain and bouts of depression often go hand in hand in McCahon’s correspondence. “The weather, endlessly wet — really wet,” was not only an emotional hindrance, landing McCahon in an “awful hump of a longlasting [sic] depression” or “a bad way for some weeks”, but also a practical hindrance, it being “too wet & cold to work”.¹⁵ Rain slowed the drying of paint, making large-scale works particularly hard to manage in his approximately 37m² studio interior.¹⁶ Often working on unstretched canvas, large works could not be rolled until thoroughly dry, if at all.¹⁷ McCahon mitigated this constraint by constructing a cantilever system that could hoist a section of a canvas work off the ground while other sections could remain flat on the floor, available to work on.¹⁸ Three wooden dowels, tied at their ends with cord, were hooked over cup hooks attached to the beams of the ceiling, allowing a long canvas work to be draped over one, two, or all three of the wooden rods and hoisted above the ground.¹⁹ The heights of the rods were individually alterable according to where the cords were tied.²⁰ This allowed McCahon not only to continue working on a large-scale painting in wet conditions but also still to see the canvas in its entirety, continuous and building. The size and moist conditions of McCahon’s Muriwai studio clearly still required some of the makeshift ingenuity of his earlier studio spaces.²¹ Evidently, rain was less a distraction to McCahon than an actual, practical hindrance that required solutions. When in the motions of painting a large-scale work, the potential for rain to limit his pace was not a welcome distraction.

Ironically, when finding the process of painting parti­cularly difficult, good weather proved a greater obstruction. Sunshine could hinder the pace of McCahon’s painting because it opened up temptations to be outside his studio, gardening, mowing the lawn, and looking out over the ocean view. In April 1971, McCahon wrote to McLeavey:

“I’m doing winter gardening and so on now – all tied up in it – and no painting – feel I won’t ever paint again; I have to do better than the giant summer painting spree and find I’m just scared to be as banal as I know I’m going to be. Seed packets & nurseries of little trees get me… – I’m a past master at JUNGLES – but seriously. It is so.”²²

In this instance, gardening appears to have been a technique for soothing McCahon’s fear of suddenly only producing inadequate or banal works. The “giant summer painting spree” McCahon felt he had to “better” was his “Victory over death” paintings, including Practical religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha (1969–1970) and Victory over death 2 (1970).²³ Both large-scale, densely textual, predominantly black and white paintings, these works embodied a style McCahon had become famous for and one that had entered the New Zealand public consciousness.²⁴ Between his completion of Practical religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha and Victory over death 2 in 1970 and his letter to McLeavey in April 1971, McCahon was working on his The view from the top of the cliff series. Perhaps these watercolour landscapes felt prosaic compared to his “Victory over death” series, and thus McCahon felt no ‘real’, valuable painting had occurred at all.²⁵ These watercolours may not have felt like a step forward in his style or career and generally have not been treated as such by scholars writing across McCahon’s oeuvre.²⁶

The precarity of an artist’s career was something McLeavey and McCahon often discussed in their letters because, while friends, their separate livelihoods were reliant on each other’s individual success and continued commitment to their work.²⁷ In a letter in July 1971, McCahon presented McLeavey with the following dramatic statement: “[t]his business of living off painting is tough. So far – so good – but I’ve got to keep it up or Anne and I starve.”²⁸ McCahon’s honesty with McLeavey regarding his career anxieties has a tone of contrition: concern that his shortcomings could affect them both. His need to “keep it up”, painting at a rapid pace, was directly followed by the admission:

“[a]m out here to work & so far have done nothing today – I just couldn’t get going & went out looking – which is work too I suppose. I planted a tree too. Today, hot & sunny, no wind, no wind tonight either. This area is usually violently windy and torn apart by South Easterly squalls. Today - a false spring and all most romantically beautiful.”²⁹

The pressure to paint quickly and prolifically, to capitalise on his growing reputation and market demand, did not keep McCahon from turning to matters outside his studio and letting his whims to paint be dictated by the weather. Often reading like a stream of consciousness, McCahon’s letters to McLeavey commonly flit between a potential exhibition, a good sale, and a patch of opportunistic gardening. For example, in a March 1972 passage updating McLeavey about his upcoming major retrospective at Auckland City Art Gallery, unmown grass becomes the priority topic.³⁰ McCahon admitted to McLeavey his impatience to return to Muriwai from a trip away, not to paint, but to mow the lawn: “[a]m off to Muriwai tomorrow for 2 [sic] days to get some work done – this includes lawn-mowing. It’s not been done since before Christmas and the seed heads catch in my toes and feel unpleasant - I get bunches of toe-hitched grass into the studio.”³¹ Whether sowing blue lupins, waiting for grass seed to grow, or celebrating hundreds of jonquils blooming, there was always something else to do other than painting.³²

McCahon’s disclosures to McLeavey about his routines and distractions might constitute a quiet request for acknowledgement of the realities of distraction and inconsistencies of pace when painting – that making art was hard-going, prime conditions or not. McLeavey appears to have met McCahon’s request, acknowledging his tendency to divert the pressures of his career into other tasks.³³ In June 1971, McLeavey asked McCahon if he was still working at his “plantation” and sympathised: “I must say I find it very satisfying and also relaxing digging and cleaving ground.”³⁴ McLeavey appears to reassure McCahon that some moments of distraction and decompression are necessary.

Although references to the weather, the view, and one’s location are customary in letter-writing, for McCahon these topics were essential elements through which he divulged his feelings about his practice to McLeavey and revealed his desire for his painting routine to remain precariously reliant on the whims of the world beyond his studio. To blame the weather was to hand over some of the burden of producing ‘good’ work and to remind those unfamiliar with the difficulties of being a working artist that producing work was often just, as one letter describes it, “plain hard slog”.³⁵ This initial period of painting full-time at Muriwai was a time in which McCahon reckoned with his own attitudes towards his practice, particularly the question of whether painting, and all of the activities required to prepare, self-motivate, and sustain momentum around it, qualified as proper work.

As much as environmental distractions drew McCahon away from the act of painting, they also performed a necessary role in influencing what McCahon was painting. Spending time in the sun gardening, mowing the lawn, or looking out over Muriwai may have felt like a distraction from his ‘work’, but these distractions fostered a period of important development in his painting practice. McCahon’s tendency to be distracted by the weather and landscape around his studio was simultaneously a return to close observation as a key element of his practice. Becoming intimately familiar with the Muriwai landscape and receptive to the different appearances of colour and light possible across the skyline at different times of the day was only available to McCahon as a consequence of his sustained looking out over the Muriwai landscape.

This is evidenced in the first series of works McCahon exhibited after leaving Elam in January: a collection of colourful watercolours of sunset-steeped oceanscapes and landscapes for his April 1971 exhibition at Peter McLeavey Gallery, View from the top of the cliff: an exhibition of watercolours by Colin McCahon (see Figs 1, 2, 3). Although quickly rendered, these paintings show careful attention to light, colour, reflections on the ocean’s surface, and atmospheric conditions. This reflects McCahon’s close relationship with the environmental conditions around his studio at Muriwai and his proclivity for spending time observing the view.

Figure 1. 

Photograph of the installation of View from the top of the cliff: an exhibition of watercolours by Colin McCahon at Peter McLeavey Gallery, 1971. Peter McLeavey Gallery: Records, MS-Papers-12387-030, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

Figure 2. 

Photograph of the installation of View from the top of the cliff: an exhibition of watercolours by Colin McCahon at Peter McLeavey Gallery, 1971. Peter McLeavey Gallery: Records, MS-Papers-12387-030, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

Figure 3. 

Photograph of the installation of View from the top of the cliff: an exhibition of watercolours by Colin McCahon at Peter McLeavey Gallery, 1971. Peter McLeavey Gallery: Records, MS-Papers-12387-030, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

In The view from the top of the cliff series, McCahon shows particular care in his depiction of weather patterns around Muriwai, a quality Justin Paton deems integral to doing justice to the Muriwai landscape, with its quickly changing weather, fiercely bright sunsets, and wind-whipped waves.³⁶

Just as the weather could push McCahon into action, hauling canvases up off the floor to dry during periods of rain or abandoning them for the call of his garden during periods of sun, it could also force him to stay still and observe. Observing the land and sea appears to have held a contentious place in McCahon’s judgement about which elements of art-making were work and which felt too leisurely to really count. A series of sunsets, The view from the top of the cliff locates McCahon nightly out on the cliffs of Muriwai, waiting to see what colours and forms might appear and require capturing. This aligns with McCahon’s preference at this time for painting from the late afternoon into the evening. In the exhibition catalogue for Colin McCahon: a survey exhibition (1972), McCahon explained his difficulty painting during “the world’s usual work-time”:

“[m]y painting year happens first in late winter and early spring. I paint with the seasons and paint best during the long hot summers. I prefer to paint at night or more especially in the late summer afternoons when, as the light fades, tonal relationships become terrifyingly clear.”³⁷

Painting the sunset, “as the light fades”, bridged the transitional period from daytime, or “the world’s usual work-time”, into McCahon’s preferred working hours of early evening and night.³⁸ Painting the same sunset repeatedly, McCahon allowed himself a recurring moment with the view, with the slow changes of light. This may have been an initial reckoning with his resistance to the idea that making art full-time constituted valid work, especially in its slow or apparently ‘unproductive’ moments, such as observation. As McCahon tentatively admits to McLeavey, his need to walk out from his studio to stand with the view regularly while painting was “work too – I suppose.”³⁹ The way practices of slow looking interrupted painting were evidently uncomfortable for McCahon. They could feel like a distraction, even when necessary for his process and directly influential on the subsequent paintings he produced.

In 1971 particularly, slow observational work was integral to what McCahon was interested in capturing. By the 1970s, McCahon typically dealt with landscapes in the abstract, his preferred shorthand for describing something of their uniqueness or ubiquitousness, but in The view from the top of the cliff series, McCahon instead approached the Muriwai landscape with an interest in accuracy of detail: in quick, direct representation.⁴⁰ These paintings are compositionally repetitious, each featuring two stacked blocks of colour, the upper depicting sky and the lower either ocean or land, faithful to McCahon’s viewpoint from the cliffs of Muriwai. McCahon was aware that these works appeared to indicate a momentary stylistic shift in his work. As he described to the director of Dawson’s Gallery Maureen Hitchings, with whom he exhibited a similar series of watercolour landscapes of Kaipara Harbour and Helensville in July and August 1971, “[a]ll this colour and fun is a direct result of leaving the school.”⁴¹ McCahon evidently associated this particular style with new freedoms made possible by leaving his position at Elam and immersing himself in his practice full-time, such as the freedom to spend time noticing the unusual properties of colour manifested across an entire sunset.

In each painting, McCahon made unique choices about how to describe with accuracy the properties of light he was observing at Muriwai. Light perceived through layers of cloud looked very different from light bouncing off the rough surface of the ocean, and a sunset through rain possessed different qualities from one unfolding across a clear sky. For example, in one painting titled The view from the top of the cliff McCahon was able to depict the last moments of a particular sunset without the straightforward inclusion of a spherical sun motif. Instead, McCahon has implied the sun setting with areas of bright light, including an acidic pea-green streak painted diagonally from the bottom of the paper to the upper edge of a blue rectangle of ocean. Over the horizon line where the blue wash ends, McCahon has left the paper unpainted, the beige ground the lightest colour in the palette of the painting and in stark contrast to the orange wash of sky above. The unpainted paper is transformed into a hot flash of final sunlight, shooting gold-green across the surface of the water.

In contrast, The view from the top of the cliff (Fig. 4) deals with the erratic motions of turbulent weather. A muddy red sky over a purple ocean is cut through with several overlapping lines of loops, appearing to have either been added to the red-painted base with some red-saturated sharp point or scratched away, perhaps with a stick, paintbrush handle, or fingernail. Like many of the paintings from this series, The view from the top of the cliff (Fig. 4) defies its painted flatness, having a distinct sense of atmospheric pressure: layers of cloud, swirling rain, and even the almost perceptually invisible experience of moisture breathed in and out of storm clouds. Each painting from The view from the top of the cliff series reflects unique approaches to representing weather and light through colour. This is something McLeavey drew attention to when describing the hang to McCahon, who did not attend the opening of the exhibition: “[t]he show looked great, as it was, unframed; the colours just sung out and filled the room. Heaven! When the sun moved in through the nylon curtains the whole room was diffused with colour – it was all over the place.”

Figure 4. 

Colin McCahon, The view from the top of the cliff, 1971, watercolour on paper, 794 × 589 mm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, on loan from a private collection. Courtesy of the Colin McCahon Trust.

Whether McCahon yet understood that the ‘distraction’ of observational work was necessary to his process is difficult to glean from this series. What these paintings do describe is some kind of reckoning with the environmental distractions that often dictated, but also inspired, his practice.

Alongside depictions of Muriwai in View from the top of the cliff: an exhibition of watercolours by Colin McCahon, McCahon included an almost identical painting titled Ahipara (Fig. 5). Although Ahipara is located hours up the West Coast, the landscape follows a similar format to McCahon’s paintings of Muriwai: a wash of colour for sky, a wash of colour for land or ocean, and a horizon line painted in. What makes this work particularly unique is the appearance of a ghostly blue handprint in the lower left corner of the painting. In the medium blues of the upper section, a clean hand appears to have been placed against the blue paint while still wet. The hand, wet with paint, then made contact with the paper again, redistributing blue into the pale orange wash of the lower two-thirds of the painting. One handprint exists in the negative and one in the bright blue positive. This quick, tactile moment of experimentation with paint recalls ancient cave paintings or children’s finger paintings, potentially a reach for atavism in a moment of stylistic insecurity.

Figure 5. 

Colin McCahon, Ahipara, 1971, watercolour on paper, 790 × 585 mm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, on loan from a private collection. Courtesy of the Colin McCahon Trust.

McCahon’s placing of his hand in the landscape, touching down over both land and sky, describes something unique about how he was painting in 1971. Introducing his hand into the wet paint, McCahon was painting in an embodied, physical way made possible by spending his days and nights in the landscape, where he was fostering a heightened sensitivity to its effects on him: emotional, practical, physical. For McCahon, painting a landscape required more than the representation of an optic experience; a landscape was physically wet or dry, hot, “clammy”, or wind-battered.⁴² A landscape could represent a bout of depression caused by persistent rain or unfurling happiness supported by blooming flowers.⁴³ Ahipara and The view from the top of the cliff series are confessional in a similar way to McCahon’s letters to McLeavey. Both are emotionally intimate renderings of a specific moment in McCahon’s life, concerned with the power of a landscape and its atmospheric conditions to dictate how one might feel on a given day. In their essence, these works are the result of distractions, made possible by McCahon giving in to his desire to stop painting, to be out in the landscape, gardening, mowing, or just observing the land.

Although McCahon was self-critical of his tendency towards distractions, his production of The view from the top of the cliff series in 1971 indicates the necessity of distractions, not only to sustain himself in his career by providing decompressive breaks from painting but also for re-energising his painting practice. Distractions from painting were of artistic value, physically engaging McCahon with the environmental conditions he sought to capture in landscapes such as Muriwai. Whether McCahon was self-aware of his role in manufacturing distractions around his practice is difficult to discern, particularly because of the shame he associated with lax work. What McCahon appears to have been aware of is that establishing a relationship between the climate at Muriwai and the routines of his work formed a new set of restrictions under which he could wrestle with painting as something hard-won, something that felt sufficiently like hard work or like ‘work’ at all. What a sunset, a flower, or a spray of unmown grass provided to his practice was unmeasurable and therefore a precarious use of time. Distractions evidently held such an important place in McCahon’s sense of self as a painter because of their role as a counterpoint to hard work.