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Friday 14 September 2012

McCahon, Baxter and Hayman (2)

More light is shed on the links Colin McCahon shared with James K. Baxter and Patrick Hayman, together with their shared focus on words, by the books Answering Hark and Patrick Hayman: Visionary Artist.

Peter Simpson writes that "McCahon had a considerable capacity and need for friendship. The friends of McCahon's youth in Dunedin - especially Doris Lusk, Rodney Kennedy, Ron O'Reilly, Toss Woollaston, Charles Brasch, and James K. Baxter - remained his friends for life." Mel Gooding adds that Hayman "fell in with a group of young student artists and writers" at Dunedin, "most studying at the small art school there." "Predominantly from South Island, these gifted people were to become a significant part of what constituted New Zealand's avant-garde. They included the young Colin McCahon, now widely regarded as the outstanding figure in New Zealand art in the twentieth century, Anne Hamblett, Elespie Forsyth, Rodney Kennedy and Ronald O'Reilly. Hayman had until this moment clung to the notion that his vocation was to be a writer: 'I had been trying to write, but I simply couldn't, I couldn't get a word out ...' It was at this point that he started to paint. It was as simple and immediate as that. 'It was a miraculous experience; it just broke out of me ... Painting was a marvellous release.'"

"This continuous close contact with an artist of extraordinary gift and essentially religious vision had a profound influence on Hayman: McCahon remained for him a model of artistic integrity and dedication." When McCahon married Anne Hamblett in 1942, "Haymen presented them with a copy of C.A. Cotton's classic Geomorphology of New Zealand, which described, with analytical diagrams, the physical formations of the islands' topographies. McCahon had been for some time struggling with formalistic ideas derived (at a distance) from Cézanne, an artist with whom Hayman felt little empathy. The gift registered an intelligently critical and sympathetic understanding of McCahon's formal preoccupation with the underlying structures of landscapes they both knew well."

"In 'Words for Painting', a sequence of small prose poems written close to the end of his life," Hayman "created a vivid picture of his creative universe and of his unique but immediately recognisable way of working within it." "Here, in a language whose startling immediacy is expressive of an utterly uninhibited spirit, Hayman creates images that at once convey the imaginative compulsion that animates his art and the procedures by which it comes into being. Their phemenological space is that of the reverie, the waking dream, in which outside and inside, psychically and physically considered, are conflated, and in which magical transformations take place, confounding category and defying common sense."

"'In the garden the trees talk - birds are words' (that rhyme is imperative, it reveals a truth through sound as well as sense): the birds are the insubstantial voices of the trees, bringing a language of sign and sound to the secret world of the garden. In the enclosed room within the house - in the studio - they are transmuted again, into things of visible, plastic substance. As the work comes into being in this interior space, a reverie made substantial, it transforms the room, and the house becomes one with the inner space of the imagination, an image for it, a metaphor ... Paintings - or the magical substitution of words for painting - are like windows through which we may look. Dark falls, darkness completes the work of the imagination. Daydreams give way to the dreams of the night."

Simpson also explores the source of McCahon's interest in words. He writes that partly it was "his fixation on the Bible ('In the beginning was the word ...'), partly his friendship with poets and their affinity for his work (... Caselberg ... Baxter, Brasch, Mason, and others), and partly, perhaps, because of his passionate desire for communication, and his growing conviction that words were necessary to get his 'message' across." "In 1973 McCahon told Pat France: 'Poetry, before painting, is my friend. The one without the other can't exist'."

Simpson writes that "Baxter was a keen admirer of McCahon's work" and wrote "a spirited defence of it in the student journal, Canta." "Baxter identified three main difficulties in appreciating McCahon. The first is ignorance of the art tradition he is utilising (Baxter refers to Hieronymous Bosch, Fra Angelico, William Blake and surrealism). Second is the popular preference for 'naturalistic' art and the distrust of 'all symbolism and subjectivism':

The third difficulty comes from his choice of subject and his handling of it. The raw quality of his crucifixions might well offend a church-goer who wished to forget Christ on weekdays. There is in them a good deal of pity and terror and the monstrously ludicrous element that lies in all suffering ... But McCahon ... is expressing the sour and struggling piety that lies behind the blank mask of Presbyterianism. Instead of revolting from his environment he learns to accept it. His Christs and angels are reconciled with the fertile hills behind them ..."

"Foul-mouthed, honey-tongued, social critic and wild prophet," Baxter also "entranced and scandalised the population in equal measure." Baxter "became one of New Zealand’s finest poets and most controversial figures, often at odds with a society unable to stomach its disturbing reflection in his work." He "once described each of his poems as ‘part of a large subconscious corpus of personal myth, like an island above the sea, but joined underwater to other islands’, and elsewhere commented that what ‘happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology’."

"Baxter first met McCahon in Dunedin in 1943 when Baxter was a 17 year old schoolboy; McCahon's painting A Candle in a Dark Room was prompted by this meeting." Baxter also introduced McCahon to John Caselberg, the poet with whom McCahon would collaborate most frequently. "Caselberg's neo-romantic elevation of perspective and rhetoric ran counter to ... the colloquial directness, social satire and existential self-scrutiny of ... James K. Baxter." Following Baxter's death, McCahon painted a series of Stations of the Cross for him - "mostly black & dirty white moving to purple, violet & yellow." He wrote that he "trembled for days before putting purple & violet & yellow in the last panels." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 16 Horsepower - Cinder Alley.

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