North Otago landscape 2

Colin McCahon exhibited a series of 25 North Otago landscape paintings at Barry Lett Galleries in Auckland in October 1967. In a statement accompanying the exhibition, he wrote:

‘In painting this landscape I am not trying to show any simple likeness to a specific place. These paintings are most certainly about my long love affair with North Otago as a unique and lonely place, they are also about where I am now and where I have been since the time when I was in standards four and five at primary school and living in North Otago.

‘These paintings stand now as a part of a search begun in Dunedin, continued in Oamaru and developed by the processes of normal erosion since then. The real subject is buried in the works themselves and needs no intellectual striving to be revealed - perhaps they are just North Otago Landscapes.’

North Otago landscape no. 2, one of the largest paintings in the series, was the first work by McCahon to be acquired by Te Papa’s precursor, the National Art Gallery