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By the summer of 1969, New Zealand painter Colin McCahon had begun to search for fresh subject matter to paint. It was a period of increasing acclaim and recognition for McCahon. In July of the previous year, influential American art critic Clement Greenberg, visiting New Zealand, declared in an interview that he had been 'impressed by the work of Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston'. In August 1969 Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington - one of the two dealers McCahon now had - held a small retrospective exhibition of seventeen paintings and watercolours from the collection of his patron, Ron O'Reilly. For the first time in his career McCahon's work was selling well and he was slowly moving towards the position where he could paint full-time. He had moved in May 1969 into a large purpose-built studio at Muriwai Beach, outside Auckland, which allowed him to work at the scale of the abstract paintings he had seen during his trip to the United States in 1958. McCahon finally felt confident that he had found his painterly language. He was conscious that it was time to make a grand statement, something that at once summarised what came before and pointed in new directions, something like a manifesto for the artistic method he was attempting to impart to his students at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland ...

In an attempt to say what Victory over death 2 means, critics inevitably begin with the 'I AM'. It appears as both a conclusion to McCahon's long-term interest in landscape - with the vertices of the 'M' forming mountainsides and the scumble of white paint between them clouds - and a painterly declaration of independence, along the lines of Barnett Newman's zips. 'I AM' are not only Christ's words from John (and beyond them, God's from Exodus), but also McCahon's own as a painter. An early newspaper review of the 1970 Barry Lett exhibition by Hamish Keith underlines this, stating the painting confronts us 'with one man's intensely realised vision of what might be meant by life and death, salvation and resurrection'.3 It is the prelude to an autobiographical reading of the painting, which sees it as an index or expression of McCahon's own religious faith. And it is a reading that was still to be found at the 2002 retrospective 'A Question of Faith', held at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, in which, as if to authorise the autobiographical, Australian writer Murray Bail was simply to title his catalogue essay 'I Am'. The exhibition's curator, Marja Bloem, herself made much of an equivalence between McCahon's work and his faith, to the extent of suggesting that McCahon's final renouncing of painting was an effect of his loss of faith. It is a reading that is largely followed by New Zealand critic Francis Pound, who similarly argues that McCahon lost faith towards the end of his life, although this is challenged by McCahon biographer Gordon H. Brown, who contends (still pursuing an autobiographical equivalence) that even in the late A letter to Hebrews, 1979-80, there is no evidence that McCahon has lost his religious belief ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Winter 2010 issue.