ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
Central Otago Landscape depicts a hilly terrain adjacent to the Southern Alps in
the characteristic browns, yellows, greens and reds of New Zealand fields, and the
objects in the painting are built from cubist elements, but to a lighter degree than
“standard” cubist paintings, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, and in Central Otago Landscape this provides a cartoon-like effect to the
image. In the bottom centre-left of the picture is situated a man in a black suit and
trilby hat who is walking a black dog, surveying the scene he is about to walk
across. The piece has some snow-topped mountains, a large tree, a red and white
house and a river which provide colour contrasts built gradually from the choice of
colours adjacent to these images. The clouds at the top of the picture are constructed by use of cubist squares, and the mountains immediately below are additionally,
although the further down the scene the viewer looks, the more these cubist forms
fade and change slightly to aid in constructing the “smoother” hills immediately
underneath the mountains, and eventually the viewer reaches the river which possesses almost none of these strokes. The piece as a whole is an exercise in such
gradual change juxtaposed with sharp contrasts. It is interesting to note that both
Central Otago Landscape and Cass share the element of human presence in a
landscape that the provoking Komar and Melamid study suggests increases interest
in a landscape, potentially a reason why these paintings are among her more popular works. The inclusion of human character in the scene engages theory of mind
by inviting the sense of, and interest in, another person’s presence, so it is likely
that Angus’s inclusion of traits of human presence in these paintings stimulates
tendencies for increased focus and curiosity. The inclusion of figures shows the
loneliness and adventure in habituating to very isolated places, characterizing danger and intrepidity.
Cass neglects the use of cubism to create land forms, and rather creates land forms
nevertheless as “rhythmic entities” through the use of carefully created lines which
bend smoothly and, under Angus’s hands, have an effect of movement and
“rhythm”. The scene is of a station at Cass in the South Island, and the black-suited
man in a trilby hat is again featured, sitting down in a reflective manner. The contents of the picture are clear and distinct, with the horizontal and vertical lines of
the buildings and objects in the foreground contrasting with the diagonals in the
hills. Unlike Central Otago Landscape, the central themes in Cass are mundane
artificial entities, and include randomly scattered planks of wood which are nevertheless carefully placed by the artist in relation to the other themes in the work. As
a whole, the piece is bright, inviting and creates a sense of familiarity amidst a
background of uninhabited land, and Angus wrote of her intent for the painting that
“it expresses joy in living here”1. The originalities of Angus’s paintings for which
she is praised, captured prominently in these two works, are thus certain techniques
unique in the history of New Zealand art to create her images, and an ability to use
the landscape to create certain elements that can be claimed as part of New Zealandism, as in familiarity of human settlement in an otherwise largely uninhabited
land and young country.
Colin McCahon was born in 1919, and like Angus, Keith writes, McCahon had his
work “firmly grounded in the [New Zealand] landscape...[But] unlike [Angus],
however, landscape was never the subject of his painting, but rather a device for
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