Dear Colin, Dear Ron: The Selected Letters of Colin McCahon and Ron O’Reilly
by Peter Simpson
Te Papa Press, Wellington 2024
MICHAEL DUNN
Nobody has written more extensively on Colin McCahon in recent years than Peter Simpson. His landmark two-volume study published in 2019 seems almost definitive in its detail and comprehensiveness. Now, when the field appeared to be fully covered, he has produced another remarkable publication that reproduces much of the extensive correspondence between McCahon and his close friend and long-term patron and supporter Ron O’Reilly.
Simpson points out that there are 360 or so surviving letters nearly equally divided between them, the first dating to 1944 and the last to 1981. Although McCahon was a
