THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW WERE TRUE - PART EIGHT

 

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Following the very successful THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW WERE TRUE - PARTS ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX and SEVEN which resulted in countless 'reads' and more than 50 comments, I thought it timely to  enthrall you with another- PART EIGHT - Colin McCahon's most famous paintings were actually painted by his children.

Colin McCahon was born on 1 August 1919 and died on 27 May 1987. His painting spanned over 45 years being in many styles - landscape, portraiture, abstraction, and the more widely known painted text.  He is regarded as New Zealand's most important modern artist and one of the pioneers in New Zealand modernism.

His first exhibited work 'Harbour cone from Peggy's Hill' was too abstract for the  Otago Art Society in 1939 and led to some dispute  and it was only stopped from being excluded from that year's exhibition because fellow artists threatened a boycott.

Harbour Cone from Peggy's Hill

Encouraged, McCahon continued with this style of painting for some time and, while not being deemed successful, was recognised as being a proficient landscape artist and latterly as a proponent of modernism.

Along with his landscape painting McCahon produced drawings and woodcuts for the Education Department for school journals and, with his wife, produced a series of 'pictures for children'.

These were moderately successful and led to his series of modernist portraits some of which had Christian themes.

He produced a lot of these when he wasn't painting landscapes for commissions and producing material for the education department and the house he lived in with his wife and four small children was littered with them.

One day McCahon discovered that his eldest child had scribbled over one of his paintings writing what he considered a commentary at the bottom left corner.

McCahon was livid and ranted and raved until his wife, like all practical women told him to get over it and that she in fact liked it better that way. Unbeknown to McCahon, his wife submitted the annotated painting to the, by now, more enlightened Otago Art Society where it won first prize and was purchased for a whopping sum by the New Zealand Society of Angels**.

This was a turning point in McCahon's life and the family's fortune as, inspired by the commercial success of the 'Angel' painting he got his son to 'annotate' many of the other paintings that were lying around including the landscapes.

Sales took off at such a rate that it was hard to keep up with demand so the other children were brought in to paint over the existing canvases and the new ones that Colin was churning out.

The initial annotated canvases soon developed into the more naively texted ones as the youngest children added their scrawls...

 

... and, after a while the background paintings were dispensed with and the children just painted straight on to canvases, boards, corrugated iron - anything that was in the shed.

It was a very successful family cottage industry and the output was prodigious. Many of the 'paintings' are still fetching insanely high prices at auctions to the present day.

When Colin died in 1987 it came to a close however. The family hadn't thought to produce the artwork under a collective name so that with no Colin McCahon any more they didn't have a 'named' artist to carry on.

The experience proved to be valuable though and the children, now adults, turned their skills to sign-writing and for many years ran a successful billboard business until, ironically, in the 2020s they were sued by the Colin McCahon artwork Trust (they had sold the rights to the paintings some years earlier) for copyright infringement and asked to 'cease and desist' with their large format billboards of Otago landscapes with advertising messages scrawled across them.

Remember: You heard it here first.










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** The New Zealand society of Angels was actually The New Zealand Society of Angles a part of Otago University Mathematics Department where the expensively produced logo contained a spelling error that no-one was in a hurry to correct, not having any pedantic ex schoolteachers on their staff.