Raw-boned hills

I just finished Richard Langston's superb new oral history of The Clean, In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul (I had a tear in my eye at the end). I always enjoy shoehorning into this blog stuff I like that really has nothing ostensibly to do with landscape art, and although I can't go off piste and discuss The Clean, I can quote this paragraph, which comes on p242, when they are about to record Modern Rock.

Dunedin is a city in an amphitheater of hills and harbour. It's compact, set close to nature, and a short drive from the city center is the Otago Peninsula, with the Pacific Ocean beating against its cliffs and headlands. There are seals, penguins and an albatross colony on the flanks of Taiaroa Head at the entrance to the harbour. It is a stretch of land that has inspired painters and poets and musicians - it generates a deep sense of nature and the spiritual that lingers like sea spray. One of New Zealand's leading painters of the twentieth century, Colin McCahon, painted its raw-boned hills and conical shapes in the 1940s and made them glow and pulse with an inner light. Robin White painted a portrait of the young poet Sam Hunt in singlet and gumboots, standing hands on hips in sunshine outside the pub at Portobello. It provided the setting for Martin Phillipps to walk through a ghostly grove of trees in the video for his song 'Pink Frost'. If you drive over the hill from Portobello and down onto a shingle road you come to Hoopers Inlet. As you head towards the coast there's a small community hall on your left, and this is where The Clean came to record their next album in the autumn of 1994. Out through the hall windows there's a view of toetoe and flax, bird life on the estuary and the bush-topped volcanic shape of Hereweka/Harbour Cone.

The Chills' 1984 'Pink Frost' video

Reading this I realised I knew nothing about Colin McCahon (1919-87), despite his importance in Aotearoa. I have never seen his work - the only exhibition I know of in London was way back in 1990 at the ICA, and I didn't go to it. More recent exhibitions like the Royal Academy's Oceania have featured Lisa Reihana and other contemporary artists with a focus on Maori culture but I don't imagine there's as much interest here now in McCahon's paintings. You can see some of them at the Dunedin Public Gallery website. One of the most interesting things about his paintings (for those of us keen on geography) is the way they were influenced by textbook illustrations. Learning this made me think of Geoffrey Hutchings, whose diagrams Colin Sackett used for his book The True Line. Here is a quote from an article about McCahon by Paul Stanley Ward:

Starting out as a landscape painter, McCahon’s bold representations sought to capture the majesty and difficult essence of the southern land. His take on the terrain was new; McCahon’s landscapes weren’t romantic, but pared back, primitive, almost abstract, seeking an underlying structure. As a wedding present he had received a copy of geologist G.A. Cotton’s The Geomorphology of New Zealand (3rd ed. 1942), a scientific text examining landscape forms and processes and illustrated with sketches, diagrams and photographs. Cotton’s diagrams ignored built features, trees and objects irrelevant to his scientific themes; he was attempting to strip the landscape to its geological basis. These precise drawings would inform McCahon in his efforts to find the landscape’s spiritual basis. 

The writer Sam Hunt, also mentioned in the quote above, is a poet of the road who refers to landscape as he passes through. He collaborated with The Clean's David Kilgour on an album called Falling Debris in 2009 and I'll end here by embedding one of these tracks, 'River Plateau Song.'