Truth from the King Country: Load Bearing Structures, series 3

Like aeroplanes, bridges feature throughout Colin McCahon’s practice as symbols of modernity, industrialisation, connection, and journeying. In On buildings bridges (triptych), 1952, McCahon used a triptych format which afforded him the space to build a bridge out across the landscape and connect with modernism, but his bridge was disjointed, evoking connectivity to ambiguous and obscure forms of expression. The painting’s name echoes the commonly used grammar in the titles of manifestos; it sounds like the beginning of an exposition. Bridges are signs of progress and appear in numerous modern paintings. McCahon friend Ron O’Reilly suggested that ‘there is another bridge exemplified in this work [On buildings bridges (triptych)]: the one across compositional problems that cubism, through Mary Cockburn-Mercer, had made for the painter’. Australian artist Mary Cockburn Mercer (1882–1963) acted as a keystone in the bridge linking McCahon and Cubism; she helped him to think ‘much tougher’ and encouraged him to adopt a rigorously structured composition. By the late 1970s McCahon had well and truly worked his way through European modernism and the problems of representing three-dimensional form in space. His work resonated with a stronger spiritual and emotional weight and had also become increasingly simplified. The title Truth from the King Country does not sound like a manifesto, but rather a firmer declaration. The landscape is no longer contained, as in of McCahon’s Six days in Nelson and Canterbury, 1950, but has expanded into a series of modestly scaled landscapes in which the abstract viaduct form stands like a new marker representing Christ and salvation.

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