Missing Hours... is an ongoing body of work taking on the real-life disappearance of Colin McCahon in 1984. The project opened at Starkwhite with WalkWithMe...(2016) and was followed by FrenchBayDarkly...(2017), both exhibitions playing with titles of iconicMcCahon paintings. John Reynolds’ practice has often referenced Colin McCahon, a towering figure of New Zealand art history and inescapable for many painters. Yet this key incident in the McCahon mythology, when the artist went missing in Sydney’s Royal Botanical Garden and was found five kilometres away the next morning disoriented and confused, has offered Reynolds a rich vein of imagination and intrigue. Consumed by the incident for close to 5 years, Reynolds describes his ongoing investigation as “part missing person’s archive, part pilgrimage, part art historical vagabondage.”

Straight away Reynolds casts a disquieting and hallucinogenic web of imagery and association. The star of the WalkWithMe... series is a large multi-paneled work with smaller blue, green, and dark purple panels flanking a much wider black centre. It’s a cartography of possibility in which Reynolds charts schematic streetscapes, place names, and landmarks, in silver marker. There’s a dizzying amount of references and assorted fragments here, offering what the artist describes as ‘handrails’ for McCahon during his imagined journey. The effect is discombobulating, a visual scramble that’s somewhat familiar but also confusing, evoking the disorientation of McCahon’s lost hours.

The FrenchBayDarkly… series offers a nod to McCahon’s French Bay works via their bold colour and informal grid-like structure, but Reynolds has increased the pressure. Less referential than before, now the compositions offer a tightly interlocked grid and intensity that borders on computer matrixes of science fiction, the geometry sharpened into a technologically linear and graphic mapping of space. Recalling urban street maps, Reynolds seeks to understand possible routes and journeys for McCahon’s missing hours, speculating on his movement through this unfamiliar city. 

Yet simple wayfinding analogies are too obvious. In a 2018 work titled Headmap Footage #1 the geometric grid that defines FrenchBayDarkly… has relaxed, and the work is less obviously referenced to actual streets or locations. Perhaps the artist’s real intent is seen across this vivid pink and dusky purple cosmos, for tracing the confusing mass of winding lines across the painting’s surface is maze-like. For Sigmund Freud, the unconscious resembled the dark corridors and hidden places of a labyrinth. Navigating the chaos of that maze was key to understanding the riddle of the self. For the labyrinth walker, such structures offer a physical and symbolic journey through disorientation and self-confrontation, then back out again into the world. Well known for an intense engagement with spiritual matters and a constant attempt to understand his place in the world, McCahon’s nocturnal wanderings, the Missing Hours… project seems to suggest, may be both darker and more spiritually illuminating than a simple disappearance.‍

John Reynolds is lost in the losing of Colin McCahon. If, as Australian writer Murray Bail considered, McCahon ‘reconceived Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, as the land of the long black shadow’, Reynolds is excavating the shadow of McCahon’s disappearance. His interest is not in solving the incident, but in staying deep in the missing hours, exploring all their possibilities, avenues, and dead ends; as might a traveller explore away from the tourist traps and smart suburbs. This is not an investigation to solve a disappearance, but investigation into the ideas that getting lost allows. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost Rebecca Solnit suggests that ‘Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.’ Leaving space for and inviting the unfamiliar is common practice for artists, and it is here that the Missing Hours… project rests.

In her opening essay Solnit asks “…how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?” In the next part of his evolving project John Reynolds offers us the opportunity to find out. Planned for 2019 is a Sydney-based walking event that starts where McCahon disappeared and ends in Centennial Park where he was found, 28 hours later. If psychogeography describes the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals, the trail will allow its participants to immerse themselves in the riddle of these missing hours as they move through city and space, exploring a cartography of the soul. What will they discover?

Walking’s ability to offer something way beyond the physical is well known. The action can clear the mind, aid reflection, or allow perspective during difficult times. It is tempting to speculate on Colin McCahon’s motives when he painted Walk (Series C), (1973) and imagine the work as a creative balm of sorts. No stranger to working through spiritual quandaries on the canvas, Walk (Series C) is, in part, an imagined walk along a beach with the poet James K Baxter, who had died the year before. 1973 was a difficult year for Colin McCahon. His friend Baxter was gone, and that year also brought the death of McCahon’s mother and the poet and editor Charles Brasch, an early and valued supporter of his work. McCahon turned to a place he loved, Muriwai Beach, which he painted as a sequence of views showing the changing states of the tide, horizon, and sky. Working across eleven unstretched canvases divided into fourteen numbered sections representing Stations of the Cross, McCahon fused the imagined walk with Baxter and the reenactment of Christ’s passage to his crucifixion¹.  Baxter’s life is symbolically imagined against this ritual journey, the walk along Muriwai Beach a mediation on our passage through life, its good and bad, its stumbles and falls, our ultimate departure. Across this sweeping, multi-canvas work McCahon returns to a site of personal comfort, but also, and certainly intentionally, a key place for Māori spirituality.

Spirituality - both Catholic and Māori -  is a recurring and forceful theme in McCahon’s practice. In Māori belief, spirits of the dead follow Te Ara Wairua (the spirits’ pathway) and journey up the West coast to Te Rerenga Wairua/Cape Rēinga, where they leap off the headland and begin their return to the land of their ancestors. McCahon saw Muriwai as a landing and taking-off place for souls heading north, linking this often restless and windswept West Coast beach to key places spirits pass on their journey. ‘The Christian ‘walk’ and the Māori ‘walk’ have a lot in common’ McCahon said of Walk (Series C), a painting that curator William McAloon described as ‘ultimately is a meditation on a walk common to both traditions - the journey from life to death and beyond’. 

Walking can be triumphant, or simple. A spiritual practice, or survival. Its very action and accessibility allow it to take on infinite forms and meanings; virtue or vice. Walking can be used to break the spirit - think of prisoners forced to walk from St Petersburg to Siberia’s Gulags, or the Native American Trail of Tears - or to rouse it – Dame Whina Cooper’s 1975 hikoi for Māori land rights, or the defiant 2017 Women’s Marches. “Every walk is a sort of crusade,” Henry David Thoreau proclaimed, and it is here that John Reynolds turns his attention in the next phase of the ongoing Missing Hours… project. Titled McCahon’s Way – A Great New Zealand Walk, Reynolds will create a participatory event that imagines the artist’s disappearance and lost hours.  Arbitrarily choosing a route between where McCahon went missing and where he was found 5km away, Reynolds will attempt to speculate a journey that remains a riddle.  What is known is this: In April 1984 Colin McCahon, New Zealand’s most celebrated artist, leaves his wife and another companion to enter public toilets in the Royal Botanic Garden. The toilets - the tardis of this tale - have two exits. Possibly McCahon leaves through the exit not being watched by his companions, or possibly he comes out the same door during the short time they had to move away to allow a truck to pass.  Then he is gone.  28 hours later New Zealand’s greatest painter, the ill and disoriented McCahon, is found by Australian police and taken to St Vincent’s hospital, while a major retrospective celebrating his art opens across town.‍

The actual route of McCahon’s wandering is elusive. It allows for many opposing and yet, paradoxically, equally true conceptual maps for discovering and exploring that journey. Just as walking and meditating on Christ’s journey is still all that is required to make the Stations of the Cross, McCahon’s Way – A Great New Zealand Walk is both an active and a contemplative art work. Active because whoever joins the event attempts McCahon’s movement through the city, contemplative because the purpose of the journey is to meditate on the missing hours and McCahon’s legacy. It is a journey as much about time, space, and transience as about McCahon.‍

“To be alone in
public, wandering
at night, or lying
close to the earth,
anonymous, invisible,
floating ...”

— Maggie Nelson
‍The Red Parts p.129

John Reynolds is taken with the idea of edges and the role of thresholds in McCahon’s disappearance, those literal and metaphorical places that simultaneously offer a way through and a leap into the abyss. What does being on the edge mean? What are the creative possibilities of the precarious and the liminal? Throughout the Missing Hours… project Reynolds has imagined, speculated, and dramatised the unknown territory of McCahon’s disappearance. WalkWithMe… and FrenchBayDarkly… offer imagined routes and explore landscapes of possibility and the unknown. Each painted line creates a possible journey, each line creates an edge. Most importantly, these works explore the concept of moving towards the unknown. “Edges are magic… there’s a kind of forbidden magic on the borders of things” Ali Smith writes in her essay On Edges. This magic is known to artists, many of whom are drawn to the unknown and particular uncertainties that most attract or terrorise them. It is in this voluptuous surrender that the edge of productivity and the collapse of productivity, that creativity and a gateway to the new, is discovered. 

Considering his knowledge of Māori spirituality, Colin McCahon must have been aware of the Māori Creation Story. This begins with a time known as Te Kore, the chaos, or the void. Te Kore is the realm between being and non-being, the realm of potential being, a space of energy, unlimited possibility, and nothingness.  Simultaneously void, chaos, and yet to be realised fantastical creative energy, this is fertile ground. It is the source of our biggest challenges as well as the fuel of our greatest potential. Te Kore, also referred to as ‘The Many Realms of Unorganised Potential’, is the best description I’ve found yet of the creative process. One of the most innovative and important painters in modern history, McCahon surely recognised this state of chaos, creativity, and productive disorientation. In staging McCahon’s Way – A Great New Zealand Walk John Reynolds is not only excavating the McCahon mythology but trying to find something out about the nature of the creative process. McCahon was not unfamiliar with leaving the door open to the unknown and, Reynolds speculates, this may be one possibility for his prolonged disappearance and the journey that took him over 5km from where he went missing. Perhaps, Reynolds suspects, an appetite for the unfamiliar and habit of moving towards the unknown had worn comfortable grooves for McCahon. But answers aren’t the point of the Missing Hours… project, which suggests that questions are often more significant than their answers.

Potential’, is the best description I’ve found yet of the creative process. One of the most innovative and important painters in modern history, McCahon surely recognised this state of chaos, creativity, and productive disorientation. In staging McCahon’s Way – A Great New Zealand Walk John Reynolds is not only excavating the McCahon mythology but trying to find something out about the nature of the creative process. McCahon was not unfamiliar with leaving the door open to the unknown and, Reynolds speculates, this may be one possibility for his prolonged disappearance and the journey that took him over 5km from where he went missing. Perhaps, Reynolds suspects, an appetite for the unfamiliar and habit of moving towards the unknown had worn comfortable grooves for McCahon. But answers aren’t the point of the Missing Hours… project, which suggests that questions are often more significant than their answers.


Kelly Carmichael