Artwork Information

Colin McCahon began employing a cubist approach to the New Zealand landscape in the early 1950s. Seeing aerial photographs of the Canterbury region published in the Weekly News stimulated him. His study of cubism resulted from lessons that he had with the Australian artist Mary Cockburn-Mercer, who had known cubist artists while she was living in Paris before World War 1. The beginnings of McCahon’s layering of the New Zealand landscape can be observed in this painting. (Golden, 2004)