Bach Bing & ‘Horse Opera’
During the decade (1938–1948) that Colin McCahon lived and worked intermittently in various parts of Nelson, he made three epic trips by pushbike over the immense Takaka Hill—16 kms to the top, 13 kms to the bottom—to Takaka Valley, Golden Bay, Collingwood and Farewell Spit. The first was in 1940 when he was working near Riwaka;1 the two later trips happened in December of 1946 and 1947 while he was living at Tahunanui.
The third trip was much the most productive for painting, resulting in five exceptional landscapes—four oils and a watercolour—painted in January 1948 in time for inclusion in McCahon’s Wellington Public Library exhibition in February. They were: The Promised Land, Ligar Bay, Dear Wee June, Monday Morning near Takaka and The Caterpillar Landscape with Separation Point (watercolour). Later in 1948 in Christchurch came two further Takaka paintings—The sink-hole landscape and Takaka: night and day—while most of the earlier ones were repainted, Monday Morning so extensively that it necessitated a change of title. The six oils were included in McCahon’s September–October 1948 exhibition at Dunedin Public Library.2
After his first trip in 1940 he told his sister, Beatrice: ‘the country through is by far the most wild & unusual of any places yet mentioned’. He went next in December 1946 and a year later informed Ron O’Reilly: ‘Myself am going over for a few days to Takaka to paint there[,] Afterwards he wrote to his parents:
