ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
an artwork. To name just a few examples: Ry Cooder’s and Ali Farka Touri’s interest in the cultural and geographic factors that make Malian pentatonic music
different from Mississippian pentatonic blues, such as the different lyrics’ subjects
and inspiration to play (Obrecht 2011); the attempts to understand artists’ works by
understanding their lives and what influenced them, from Mary Shelley (Kostelanetz Mellor 1989) and Charlie Parker (Woideck 1998), to Hồ Xuân Hương
(Balaban 2000) and Johannes Vermeer (Bailey 2001), and in ethnographic art,
such as Ainu interest in how their fore-generations created artforms now being rediscovered (Miller 2014); discussion about what artworks mean, especially when
their creators said there was no meaning, or did not discuss the meaning, like the
composing of Bohemian Rhapsody (e.g. Whiteley 2006); and the mystery around
why the first known paintings, from Maros, Indonesia (Aubert et al. 2014) to
Chauvet and Coliboaia in Europe, were painted (Curtis 2007). These are all based
on understanding the artist behind the work in order to understand the viewpoint or
ideas or their formulation – products of the mind and useful for our minds to interact, play and develop with – or the perspectives and ideas themselves.
Colin McCahon’s painting style is highly distinct, encompassing biblical themes,
New Zealand landscapes and neat, schooldesk-style graffiti sentences throughout
his life’s works. His work is famously dark, with black and dark shades of other
colours overwhelming the canvas. Many of his works, like Victory Over Death 2,
are shades of only black and white, often in stark contrasts and subtle gradation.
He was a self-taught painter and poet and said he fell in love with signwriting
when he was a young boy after seeing a sign writer at work in a shop, sparking a
lifelong use in his work (McCahon 1966). He is often quoted as saying about his
painting that “I will need words”, though he also complained that using words limited his works toward particular interpretation. “No one seems to know what I’m
on about, it amazes me, no one seems to know that I am painting Christ” (quoted in
Bail 2003). He once famously said when discussing a series of paintings called B