No Ordinary Plain: Seeing and Unseeing the Taieri with McCahon
Abstract
There are three recorded moments of Colin McCahon encountering the Taieri Plain. In 1936, as a schoolboy, he experienced an epiphany looking over the Taieri from the coastal hills. Six years later, in 1942, he painted Sketch for landscape from Flagstaff, depicting the plain from a northern perspective. In 1966, he famously recalled his early epiphany in an essay entitled “Beginnings.” In this essay, I bring a sociohistorical and personal perspective to these three moments, arguing that knowledge of the details that McCahon was seeing and unseeing in his 1942 sketch bring nuance to our understanding of his early development.
Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Published
2020-12-14
How to Cite
MCCABE, Jane.
No Ordinary Plain: Seeing and Unseeing the Taieri with McCahon.
The Journal of New Zealand Studies, [S.l.], n. NS31, dec. 2020.
ISSN 2324-3740.
Available at: <https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/jnzs/article/view/6677>. Date accessed: 24 jan. 2021.
doi: https://doi.org/10.26686/jnzs.v0iNS31.6677.
Section
Articles
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
The Journal of New Zealand Studies retains the copyright of material published in the journal, but permission to reproduce articles free of charge on other open access sites will not normally be withheld. Any such reproduction must be accompanied by an acknowledgement of initial publication in the Journal of New Zealand Studies.