Essay by Peter Simpson
Sometimes, the title of a Colin McCahon painting is less a description of its subject than an identifier of its place within his oeuvre. In the present instance, viewers who seek the work’s meaning through its title alone are bound to be bewildered; it relates to the painting’s subject only very obliquely.
Gordon H Brown explained the series title, Rocks in the sky, by recalling how “… McCahon’s grandson… viewed the unusual-looking sky with its dark, heavy, threatening clouds and… likened the effect of the clouds to ‘rocks in the sky’” (Colin McCahon: Artist, 1993, p. 140). The series was first exhibited with Noughts and crosses and On the road at Auckland’s Barry Lett Galleries in August and September 1976.
Both Rocks in the sky and Noughts and crosses contain two related sets (series 1 and 2) of seven paintings on identical sheets of Steinbach paper. Their numbers connect them with McCahon’s recurrent interest in the Stations of the Cross – the Roman Catholic 14-part narrative of Jesus’ last days. His series connect to the ‘stations’ either through containing 14 items (as in Angels and bed) or through individual paintings being inscribed with the numbers 1 to 14 (as in Teaching aids and Rocks in the sky). Rocks in the sky, in fact, combines both 14 works in the series and the numbers 1 to 14 on individual paintings – the only series in which this happens.
In terms of its imagery, Rocks in the sky follows on from Clouds (1975), a series of 10 (not 14, in this instance) in which fluffy white clouds with numbers written on them are stacked in vertical rows. In Rocks in the sky, series 1, the clouds/‘rocks’ are arranged in horizontal rows, each with a number inscribed. In series 2, however (except for no. 1), the clouds/‘rocks’ are completely (if confusingly) absent; in the others (including Warwick and Kitty Brown’s work), the numbers are written on plain backgrounds (which may double as elements of landscape) – generally either black on white or white on black or, in no. 4, black on ochre.
There is great variation in numbering; some have all Roman numbers , some all Arabic numbers, and others, a combination of Arabic and Roman numbers . Series 2, no. 4 uniquely includes two complete sets of numbers: one in large Arabic numbers, another in tiny Roman numbers. Sometimes, McCahon seems to function like a jazz musician improvising spontaneous variations on a given ‘theme’ (set of numbers). Another unusual feature of the numbering in this painting is that the vertical lines dividing one number from another as, for example, between 2 and 9, become merged with the numbers themselves from 10 to 14.
The Rocks in the sky works are dated by year (1976) but not by month; however, they give the impression of being winter paintings, the blacks and whites of their Muriwai settings enlivened only by the occasional ochres of sunset. The phrase ‘rocks in the sky’ itself evokes threatening rain clouds and, indeed, the word ‘Rain’ is inscribed along the bottom while the lower section subtly evokes a rain-swept marine landscape with traces of ochre to suggest sunset-tinged clouds. At the bottom right, dark verticals with a gap between them are reminders of Muriwai’s cliff-and-island-pinnacle landscape as rendered earlier in the Necessary Protection works.
McCahon liked to walk on Muriwai Beach in all seasons, alert to the particulars of weather, bird life (‘seagulls’) and tidal flows while simultaneously meditating on the troubled stations of earthly existence. This richly suggestive painting is an embodiment of one or more such occasions.