When McCahon declared, ‘I will need words,’ in a 1961 letter to poet John Caselberg, he was saying he needed them for something. He wanted his paintings to speak: to cut through, to communicate, to be clear in a new way about human fears and hopes and about how to love authentically. And he saw that painted words were a way to approach spiritual realities and urgencies that resisted conventional picturing.
—Justin Paton, McCahon Country
After saying here that words are limited, I came across this quote that I’d saved. McCahon clearly thought that a conventional visual image, at least for what he was trying do, was limited, and that words were necessary.
I’m not sure, yet, whether words will end up being a feature of my paintings, but I am working on one where they are. And given I also love words, maybe they will. We’ll see.
Clearly there’s a tension between various things in art—and in life.