Early Life and Development
When he was a few days old he was taken to Dunedin by his mother where he grew up attending the Maori Hill Primary School, Otago Boys High School and the Dunedin School of Art. He also spent a year in Oamaru during his primary school years. While still at secondary school he saw an exhibition in Broadway, Dunedin, by Toss Woollaston which was influential.
Field had introduced a form of British Post Impressionism. From this and from a knowledge of German Expressionism gained through Flora Scales, Woollaston had developed his own personalised form of Expressionism. McCahon responded to this and to the influence of Field when he enrolled at the school.
There he encountered and socialised with Rodney Kennedy, Doris Lusk, Anne Hamblett and Patrick Hayman. McCahon, Lusk and Hamblett, and to a lesser extent Hayman, developed a manner similar to Woollaston's on account of which they were later hailed by J.D. Charlton Edgar as "the first cell of modern art in New Zealand". They were Modernists and more specifically Expressionists, and arguably the first New Zealand-born painters to constitute a school, certainly the first representing any kind of modernism.
They were at times concerned with nationalism - establishing a painterly national identity - but not to the extent some later writers have supposed. McCahon and Woollaston were concerned with issues of Christianity and Pacifism which became acute during the second world war. The younger Dunedin painters, including McCahon, spent their summer vacations with Woollaston in Nelson.
McCahon married Hamblett in St. Matthew's Church, Dunedin in 1942. Exempted from military service on account of a medical condition, he and Hamblett struggled to make their living painting while starting a family in the middle and later 1940s. By 1948 they had relocated to Christchurch where McCahon became involved with "The Group". Later still the McCahons moved to Auckland.
In his early years McCahon often painted landscape, but in stark expressive ways and with more or less overt symbolism touching on religious matters. He regarded his Otago Peninsula painting, completed in 1949 and now in the Dunedin Public Library as an early realisation of a decades-long attempt to convey what he had felt was a vision inspired by the Otago landscape which he had experienced while on an outing in the family car when he was still a schoolboy. Later he had other inspirations and other concerns but he was recognised by his peers as exceptional from the time he was at art school.
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