Kaipara Flat - Written, 1971
During 1971 Colin McCahon produced a series of watercolour acrylic works on paper depicting the Kaipara Flats. It was at the beginning of the same year that McCahon left his teaching position at Elam, the University of Auckland’s School of Fine Arts, marking his decision to become a full-time painter. Having more time to produce work meant he could investigate beyond the confines of his studio and begin to explore the surrounding landscape.
Situated near his studio at Muriwai, the west coast area just inland from Kaipara Harbour provided the inspiration for numerous landscape works. McCahon was drawn to this somewhat barren and open environment; he found its emptiness beautiful, but also felt the spirituality and sacredness of the site, owing in part to the region’s great significance to the Maori. “From my studio at the south end of Muriwai the beach and sand bar that fronts the Tasman Sea extends 48 miles to the Kaipara harbour mouth. This is the sand dune and land area of Waioneke. Kaipara Flats are north of Helensville. This is a shockingly beautiful area. North again from Kaipara Flats a dry and north Otago-like area happens . . . I do not recommend any of this landscape as a tourist resort. It is wild and beautiful; empty and utterly beautiful. This is, after all, the coast the Maori souls pass over on their way from life to death - to Spirits Bay ‘carrying their fronds and branches’ . . . The light and sunsets here are appropriately magnificent.” (Colin McCahon in Gordon H. Brown, Colin McCahon: Artist, Reed, 1993, p.109.)
The “Kaipara Flat” works are titled under two main groupings: A poem of Kaipara Flats or Kaipara Flats - Written. Titles of individual works are distinguished from one another by numbering. Their simplicity of composition and the often brilliant use of colour make the “Kaipara Flat” series distinctive in McCahon’s career. In May of 1971 he wrote a letter to Maureen Hitchings which in part discussed his recent adoption of such a radiant palette: “all this colour and fun is a direct result of leaving school.” (ibid, p.109.) While teaching at Elam, McCahon had been restricted to working in his studio mainly at night. The new freedom of being able to pursue his art at any time of the day allowed him to observe and paint the landscape he loved in different lights, seasons and changing weather patterns, which links to the increase of colour in his work of the period.
In these works McCahon represents the landscape in a manner that has often been described as “Turneresque”, referring to the nineteenth century British painter J.M.W. Turner, who strove to portray light, space and the elemental forces of nature in his paintings. McCahon’s “Kaipara Flat” series shares a similar energy to Turner’s paintings. Here, the sky is filled with brushstrokes of extreme vigour and movement, depicting the flight patterns of the gannets that populated Muriwai.
It was during the 1970s that McCahon’s environmental concerns increased with regard to both the land, and wildlife such as the protected gannet colony at Muriwai. “My cliff top is as yet largely uncorrupted but like almost everything else it is for sale. My wife and I who would at least try to preserve it can’t afford to buy it . . . Below the cliff, my cliff only at present, quarrying is blasting away a unique and irretrievable rock face; the beach below is smothered in its debris . . . I am not painting protest pictures. I am painting what is still there and what I can still see before the sky turns black with soot and the sea becomes a slowly heaving rubbish tip. I am painting what we have got now and will never get again.” (Colin McCahon in Earth/Earth (Exhibition Catalogue), Barry Lett Galleries, 1971.) The “Kaipara Flat” works capture what McCahon believed was a unique vista, in a temporary state of beauty.