signed Mother and child October 1947 Colin McCahon verso

Colin McCahon’s Mother and child dates from 1947. The work depicts the two titular figures in a pose echoing renaissance era Madonna and child paintings. While the work clearly references European religious painting, its stylistic rendering and unadorned background contrasts starkly with the traditions of its source. Removed from the cultural context of Renaissance Italy, the holy pairing of mother and child have been transposed into a mid-century New Zealand environment and rendered in vigorously scumbled paintwork.

This re-interpretation of historical religious imagery was a central theme of McCahon’s work at this time. In the text accompanying McCahon’s 1975 exhibition at Manawatu Art Gallery, McCahon: ‘Religious’ Works 1946-1952, Curator Luit Beiringa wrote, “In using the language of religion - its Christian symbols - McCahon was confronted with a major task in reconstituting them for they belonged to a too easily recognisable tradition and needed to be simplified to regain direct impact and avoid obscurity.” Mother and child is a prime example of this reconstitution. McCahon has reduced detail, stylised the figures, and set them sharply against the muted background by giving them black outlines. This approach to painting is now readily identifiable now as a distinctive style from an important period of the artist’s career. Though at the time, it proved controversial as many struggled to grasp McCahon’s intent.

According to writer and McCahon biographer, Gordon H. Brown, the artist’s reductive style of painting these figures was a way of exploring their themes very directly. “The singleness of purpose inherent in these paintings comes close to a kind of visual puritanism which allows no elaboration of the theme beyond what is basic to its immediate comprehension. As E. C. Simpson observed at the time of the 1948 exhibition, McCahon's raw crudity gives the same sledge-hammer force as the direct simplicity of the Biblical text".

This direct simplicity to convey a message is what gives McCahon’s paintings their sheer force. Though cloaked in biblical references, that message was not an evangelical one. Writer Ron O’Reilly stated on McCahon’s religious work, “Faith and doubt is a recurrent theme in the paintings. […] he writes of himself as a doubter. Certainly he is no angel but a vulnerable mortal with all our common frailties and passions, and we can sense how near he has often come to desperation. But painting, communicating, is itself an act of faith: faith that there will be a response.” History has demonstrated that McCahon’s faith did not go unanswered. The response to what it is that his paintings communicate is still being processed throughout New Zealand nearly four decades after his death.