Artwork Information

Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species, which elaborated for the first time the theory of biological evolution, influenced Charles Cotton, a New Zealand earth scientist who believed that landscapes evolve from one form into another, especially as a result of water and soil erosion.

Influenced by Cotton’s publication Geomorphology (1922), Colin McCahon represented landscape as shifting from one form to another. He had lived in north Otago as a child and considered it ‘a unique and lonely place’. After he returning there in 1967 he wrote, ‘The real subject is buried in the works themselves and needs no intellectual striving to be revealed.’

The land erosion in this region is suggested in the foreground plain as a skin covering a flat land, while the distant, still intact hills rise up as if supporting the weight of the sand-coloured sky. McCahon painted similarly shaped hills in the adjacent painting Takaka: night and day, 1948.