ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
supporting a larger and different story”. Consequently, “landscape is not what
McCahon was about” (2007, 167, 172); rather, it is how he combined landscapes
with other themes and mixed them together. Two of McCahon’s most admired
paintings are The Marys at the Tomb and The Angel of the Annunciation, which are
surrealist scenes featuring biblical characters amid Aotearoa landscapes, and the
praise given to many of his works is to the smooth merging of ostensibly polar
themes and to the extremes he took such merging of themes. For example, Storm
Warning consists of a pitch black background with red outlines. The centerpiece is
joined handwriting in capitals, adjacent to wisps of smoky red and white in the bottom right corner. Storm Warning, Keith contends, “is not only a powerful vision
but a powerful landscape too” (2007, 172), and as such is deeply imbedded with
McCahon’s style used in nearly all of his works. Like Angus’s Cass and Central
Otago Landscape, these landscapes of McCahon’s also show the presence of humans, both with human figures and handwriting written in attention-grabbing capitals, potentially suggesting importance to the writer.
The Marys at the Tomb depicts the biblical story of the tomb of Jesus visited by a
collection of Marys, although the scene is set in the hills of the South Island of
New Zealand. The faces in the picture are upset and low, and the one in the far
right can only be seen from the back. The trees on the horizon look like silhouettes
of sheep, and the whole scene is downcast and the choice of dark colours reflects
this. Nevertheless, the tomb is open, and the character in the top left is indicating
by a pointed finger to the Marys in the bottom of the picture, suggesting with a
serious face that they move away from the tomb. The brightness of the stone objects at