Coastal Light, Northland, c. 1955. Oil on board. 40 × 55 cm.
Lot 021 · Paintings
Coastal Light, Northland
Colin McCahon (attributed)
Year
c. 1955
Medium
Oil on board
Dimensions
40 × 55 cm
Estimate
On request
A landscape of extraordinary luminosity, depicting the Northland coast at a moment when the light is doing something that only happens in New Zealand — that particular quality of illumination that McCahon described as "the light that is here and nowhere else." The composition is simple: a dark headland, a strip of sea, a sky of pale gold. But the paint surface is complex, built from multiple layers that give the light a depth and resonance that is impossible to reproduce photographically. This is a work of great beauty and considerable rarity.
Artist
Colin McCahon (attributed)
Colin McCahon (1919–1987) is the most significant New Zealand painter of the twentieth century. His work — which moved from landscape painting through a deeply personal engagement with Christian iconography to a late practice of text-based abstraction — has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Auckland Art Gallery and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The attribution of the present work is based on comparison with signed examples from the same period and on a label on the reverse. A full attribution dossier, including curatorial opinion, is available to registered bidders.