Spreading the word: Colin McCahon: Thomas Crow talks with Maria Bloem - curator Maria Bloem discusses the Colin McCahon paintings exhibited in A Question of Faith - Interview

As the scale of his work expanded to match his American contemporaries, he stuck with the symbols he knew, largely from the Bible and the codes of Christian belief, though he significantly extended his reach in the late 1960s to embrace Maori ritual and poetry. As New Zealand pursues its remarkable national effort to create an integrated country of two cultures, McCahon's visualization of speech and thought in its two languages has made him its national artist--though not without argument--in a way that transcends the chauvinism and patriotic cant normally attached to such a role. It hardly needs saying that the significance of such an achievement in art today exceeds any limitation to one locality.

Marja Bloem's exhibition aims to capture and convey the core of McCahon's legacy by concentrating on faith and its necessary opposite, the key modernist theme of uncertainty. The show has entailed a single minded commitment on her part, stretching over years, to make it a success. I spoke with her on a stopover in Los Angeles on her way from Amsterdam to move the show from Auckland to Melbourne. The following is a record of our conversation. Count it as a small effort to anticipate a different art historical future.--TC

THOMAS CROW: There are strong themes of journey and passage throughout Colin McCahon's work, and there had to be a considerable journey on your part even to get to the work, and to establish what it is that the people outside of New Zealand and Australia should know about him. It would be intriguing to hear about this passage of your own, because it was not straightforward or immediate, was it?

MARJA BLOEM: In the 1996 exhibition "Under Capricorn: The World Over," which the Stedelijk organized with the City Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, I saw one painting that I found unforgettable, and that was McCahon's Walk. Beach Walk: Series C [1973]. That painting made an enormous impression on me because the Dutch have such a tradition in seascape painting, and this canvas has that same kind of light, the sense of the sea, the surf, the air. I didn't realize then that he was representing Muriwai--a specific black-sand beach near Auckland where he had a studio--with its white foaming surf and misty sky. You see the different colors, but you catch an atmosphere that makes you aware of how beautiful this landscape is.

It turned out, of course, that his impulses were completely different than I had imagined. McCahon made long beach walks, but, depicted in such paintings as this work, they were not purely descriptive but instead a metaphor for life. It echoes that English tradition of taking long walks and using them as allegories--you might compare it to the work of Richard Long. McCahon is a modernist, but one on the periphery. His daily life triggered metaphorical thoughts, human doubt but also affirmation, in a language he had to invent himself, something totally different than anything I had come across before. I live in a very secular society and don't have that close connection to the Bible: One can respond to medieval and Renaissance religious painting, but it's history, and I was a little bit flabbergasted to come across somebody in the mid-twentieth century for whom religious painting is absolutely not history, but a reality. I'm not saying that McCahon was simply an undoubting believer or fixated on religion like a fundamentalist. That's not at all the case. He just used the language of religion to express his own doubts and his own passage in time.