"R.N. Field at the Dunedin School of Art inspired young students to break from tradition with M.T. (Toss) Woollaston, Doris Lusk, Anne Hamblett, Colin McCahon and Patrick Hayman forming the first cell of indigenous Modernism. The Second World War saw the dispersal of these painters, but not before McCahon had met a very youthful poet, James K. Baxter, in a central city studio." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Dunedin)
"Hayman spent most of his twenties in this country [UK], sailing from London on the S.S. Rangitiki early in 1936. The family already had its roots in Dunedin (his parents first met one another there) and when Hayman arrived he came into contact with Colin McCahon, his wife the painter Anne Hamblett, Doris Lusk, Rodney Kennedy, Charles Brasch and Ron O'Reilly. They were all ardent pacificists, bent on pursuing careers as artists and writers. Hayman impressed them by his quiet yet strongly opinionated nature, and although he went to the Dunedin School of Art, he was generally regarded more as a writer, particularly of short stories and poetry (described by O'Reilly as 'Kafkaesque'). After three years in Dunedin he moved northwards, pausing briefly at Mapua then he stayed at Nelson for about a year before settling down in Wellington in 1940. He enrolled at Victoria University, mixing with the more articulate senior students of History and English. John Beaglehole was a vital force in those days; a highly cultivated and civilised personality whose social conscience had prompted the proceeds of his first book on poetry to go towards relief for victims of the Spanish Civil War. Among Hayman's fellow students, who became his friends, were Hubert and Noel Witheford, Janet Paul and the Dutchman Eric Schwimmer. The arrival in New Zealand of European refugees, like Hayman and Schwimmer, stimulated a generation of young minds, already prepared to accept their national identity, and looking to broader philosophies and wider civilisations." (http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issues21to30/hayman.htm)
"Among their wedding presents the McCahons received from fellow painter Patrick Hayman a copy of Professor Charles Andrew Cotton’s Geomorphology of New Zealand. Although an academic textbook, this volume is distinguished by its author’s line drawings of different geological features, each depicted in its bare essentials, stripped of vegetation."
"In this period McCahon stripped away surface details from the landscape to expose the underlying structure of the land, a habit of seeing influenced by the drawings in Charles Cotton's Geomorphology (3rd ed. 1942), a wedding gift from the painter Patrick Hayman. Occasional portraits were also produced in these years, such as Harriet Simeon (1945), a Gauguin-like portrait of a Maori woman which anticipates by nearly two decades his later interest in Maori culture. Still life was another genre he occasionally practised as in The lamp in my studio (1945) or A candle in a dark room (1947), a Picasso-like image which doubled as a symbolic portrait (according to McCahon's own testimony) of the poet James K. Baxter." (http://www.mccahonhouse.org.nz/fifties/5360beforetitirangi.asp)
"Although the subject of some conjecture, it is possible that it was during 1943 that McCahon first met the young poet James K. Baxter, most probably during a visit to the Baxter home in Brighton, south of Dunedin. McCahon had likely gone there to talk with James’ Pacifist father, Archibald.
As well as poetry, Baxter was the author of a number of plays and a widely published critic. McCahon and Baxter shared a preoccupation with the theme of the land, a non-conformist approach to society, and convictions about the nature of religious belief and visionary experience.
Although in his writings Baxter criticised much of what he found wanting in New Zealand society, his commentary was neither negative nor despairing in the way of some of his contemporaries. Instead, he spoke of the need for New Zealanders to engage in a reconstruction of the social order whereby they might build a more inclusive community.
In 1948 McCahon was introduced to the poet John Caselberg by James K. Baxter, who had known Caselberg from his student days at Otago University. McCahon and Caselberg remained friends until McCahon’s death in 1987. Both men shared an interest in religious subjects, as well as an admiration for the writings of William Blake, the early 19th Century mystic poet." (http://www.mccahon.co.nz/files/Q_of_F-Part1.pdf)
"When the religious paintings [of McCahon] were first exhibited, many objected to their apparent rawness and awkwardness. Others, such as the artist Rita Angus and the poet James K Baxter, came to McCahon’s defence. Baxter wrote:
The raw quality of his crucifixions might well offend the church-goer who wished to forget Christ on weekdays … Instead of revolting from his environment he learns to accept it. His Christs and angels are reconciled with the fertile hills behind them." (http://nga.gov.au/McCahon/1.cfm) James K Baxter, ‘Salvation Army aesthete’, Canta, 21 July 1948, reprinted in Peter Simpson, Candle in a dark room: James K Baxter and Colin McCahon, Auckland: Auckland City Gallery, 1995, p. 13.
"McCahon’s long but intermittent friendship with James K. Baxter, which had soured in the late 1960s, was celebrated after the poet’s death in ‘Walk’ (1973), an imaginary and symbolic lifetime walk along Muriwai Beach. This spiritual reconciliation was clinched when McCahon undertook, between March and June 1973, the set designs for a festival of four of Baxter’s plays at Wellington." (http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5m4/1)
"McCahon and Baxter had first met in the 1940s, and although they had become estranged in the 1960s they continued to share a similar sense of the artist’s mission. Part of that shared sensibility was a concern with Maori spirituality. In Walk (Series C) McCahon journeys along Muriwai Beach in dialogue with his friend, perhaps recounting the shared events of their lives, perhaps seeking reconciliation. This walk runs parallel to another: in Maori belief, the spirits of the departed travel p the west coast towards Te Rerenga Wairua (Cape Reinga), from where they leap off the land to begin their final journey to the afterlife. As McCahon wrote to Peter McLeavey about the painting, ‘The Christian "walk" and the Maori "walk" have a lot in common.’(4) Drawing on personal and particular events in his own life, McCahon used them to address big themes in his art — themes of life and death, time and loss, Christian and Maori spirituality, history and place. Grand and momentous, Walk (Series C) is a painting that is vast enough to encompass them all." (http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/objectdetails.aspx?oid=657795)
"How remarkable it is - and how little it has been remarked - that two of the major religious artists of the post-war period … should have emerged from virtually the same time and place: Dunedin, New Zealand, in the 1940s … The parallels, both biographical and artistic, are extraordinary: an Otago childhood; rebellion against the conformity of family, school and society; preoccupation with the theme of the land, the people, and in particular the contrast between the natural and social order; assertion of a religious vision despite its being out of time and out of place in a materialistic secular society; alcoholism; rejection of Protestantism for a personal form of Catholicism; an evergrowing commitment to a Maori perspective; an increasingly dark, death-centred pessimissm." Candles in a Dark Room: James K. Baxter and Colin McCahon, P Simpson - Journal of New Zealand Literature: JNZL, 1995 - JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/20112267?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21100884598701)
The three share a fascination with words. "In the 1940s words began to appear in McCahon’s work. While the resulting paintings were often criticised by the public, it was important to McCahon that his messages were properly understood. He believed the directness of words could help, provide a ‘way in’ to his images. He was aware also of the long tradition of using words within painted images, especially in religious art." (http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/theme.aspx?irn=947)
"I am not a literary painter though many people think I am.
True. Colin McCahon uses words as forms. They aren’t written but constructed, with fine brushes, and lose almost all conventional associations when considered with their back-grounds. Certainly one remembers the words; but as a visual whole, in the manner in which they were painted. A parallel can be drawn with a large neon sign that stands against a distant sunset. The message, especially if it is only a single word, remains in the mind as an integral part of the landscape, a distinct form whose actual meaning is secondary to the part it plays in the scene as a whole.
Yet it is these verbal paintings (including those whose titles are incorporated) which perhaps provide the gate — a way through — to the man and to the many and varied landscapes that constitute the bulk of his work." (http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/young/mccahon.asp)
"one of McCahon's utmost achievements is that he can transform writing into painting--and that this is about meaning. It's not like those painters in the early twentieth century using letters and torn Metro tickets to enliven their surfaces. He uses the language of poets and prophets because he feels close to them. He also preferred to use another voice besides his own, although always to say what he wanted to say. He's aware that that kind of language has a more direct connection with his public, especially the New Zealand poets involved in this search for national identity.
McCahon's paintings all have a performative quality. It's especially clear in Practical religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha [1969-70], because in all the different letter styles you see McCahon enacting different voices. Again I recall how important the Kaprow performance was for him: He's trying to impart performance to painting. He doesn't need real actors because he can use the writing as an actor in an entirely visual way. Pollock comes to mind, in the sense of a holistic painting, covering the whole surface with a kind of web. McCahon's writing does something similar, and his handwriting changed according to the paint he used, with the late works using easily flowing, fast-drying acrylics." (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_1_42/ai_108691803/pg_4/?tag=content;col1)
"A discursive poetry, Baxter’s work owes much to Yeats, Eliot, Auden and Lowell and a little to Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas. It draws on New Zealand poets R.A.K. Mason and A.R.D. Fairburn and, by the poet’s own account, Lawrence Durrell.
But it is not enough to point out Baxter’s influences, though his early poetry has sometimes been accused of slavish devotion to his literary heritage. To miss Baxter’s stubborn pride in the local—the Maori phrases that pepper his language, the tricky subversion of classical English meters, the strange fusion of Catholicism and post-colonial baggage that drives the verse—is to ignore a great deal of what makes his poetry worth reading. Baxter’s fierce insistence on relating the specific to the mythological results in a kind of writing that pushes against literary parochialism (though I doubt whether the mature Baxter worried much about reaching non-Kiwi readers) and, at the same time, castigates itself for doing so. It is, at heart, a poetry of conflict. Even as it censures the sterility and viciousness of pakeha (the Maori word for white New Zealanders) culture, Baxter’s poetry takes up a dialogue with traditional English language forms—sonnets, ballads, sestinas—stretching them or chiseling them down, pouring indigenous language into the gaps where English seems to fail—aroha (love), Hatana (Satan), tapu (sacred; forbidden)." http://www.cprw.com/Misc/baxter.htm
"O’Sullivan suggests that the real achievement of Baxter’s verse is as ‘the most complete delineation yet of a New Zealand mind. The poetic record of its shaping [being] as original an act as anything we have.’ If, at times, Baxter appears to evaluate New Zealand society harshly, his judgements are always from the perspective of one intimately involved in the social process. His criticisms of national life and his ultimate decision to step out of the mainstream seemed to develop naturally from the preoccupations of a lifetime of verse. Yet these preoccupations were, as a rule, neither negative nor despairing. Rather, the deliberately mythological cast of mind that underpinned his poetry sought to place the individual (and the nation) within a wider frame by directing attention towards universal elements of human experience. The Baxter who, writing shortly before his death, found the Medusa’s head of present-day urban civilisation—with its ‘depersonalisation, centralisation, [and] desacralisation’—intolerable, could still find reason for hope ‘in the hearts of people’." (http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/baxterjk.html)
"He [Hayman] was an admirer of Marc Chagall, Emil Nolde, and Edvard Munch, as well as Alfred Wallis. Like Chagall, Jewish figures and motifs can be seen in some of Hayman’s work, as both shared this religious heritage. He also felt an artistic kinship with Oceanic artists and Byzantine icon painters." (http://www.petulloartcollection.org/the_collection/about_the_artists/artist.cfm?a_id=27)
"Hayman's roots reach much further back, to the formative visionary William Blake, whose universe was constructed equally through visual imagery and words. Hayman struck a similar chord in A Painter's Notes:
As a painter I write poetry and as a poet I wish to illustrate it. I believe in the integration of poem and illustration, of word and line, word, and painting. The nearer an artist can get to making the whole of a creative production himself the better it is. Perhaps in a time of authoritarianism, monopoly and mass production, some return to a modern equivalent of the illuminated manuscript may be necessary. Furthermore the individual artist will then perhaps be in a position to maintain control over what he produces.
Basil Dowling, who was the first to write on Hayman for a New Zealand periodical, spoke of the concentrated imaginative force of his paintings and poetry which produced 'powerful archetypal images and myths (both ancient and modern). . . .'. Sequences are drawn from the Bible, from Shakespeare or modernist drama, from historical incidents such as Riel and Dumont, or they may relate to a topical event, disturbing in its implications, for example Atomic Explosion at Mururoa. We are confronted with a highly personal vocabulary, which is by turn, both sombre and lighthearted. Hayman's illustrated poems, his richly coloured paintings, and Dada-like constructions, are all essentially icons, symbolising man's predicament in the spiritual and material world." (http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issues21to30/hayman.htm)
"Poetic, witty and poignant, his work drew upon a vast range of personal and cultural sources. Subjects from history, myth, religion and literature, and from the experience of everyday life, were drawn into and and transformed by the idiosyncratic world of his imagination. He touched nothing that did not undergo a 'sea-change into something rich and strange'. Hayman's distinctive imagery was utterly his own and yet it seemed to touch upon something deep in the spirit of those that encountered it …
his free and melancholy spirit finding expression in an outpouring of visionary drawings, paintings and constructions, as well as a number of beautiful painted poems."
"And so on dark afternoons one should take up one’s brush and paint a summer sky and beneath it the sea. Or perhaps the light on an angel’s wing. It is important, I believe, to enter another world than the visible one and by painting something which appears to be the opposite of what one sees in nature, it may be possible, momentarily, to enter a different state of being."
Patrick Hayman, "A Painter’s Notes" in The Painter & Sculptor, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter, 1959 – 60 (http://www.belgravestives.co.uk/pages/single/1051/p.html)
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David Downes - You Can Tell My Words Are Crippled Now.
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