Gordon H. Brown has worked as a freelance writer on the visual arts since 1977. He wrote the classic Colin McCahon: Artist (1984, 1993) and An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1839-1967 with Hamish Keith (1969). In 1989 he was awarded the OBE for his services to Art History.

As the 1990 Fanny Evans Fellow at the University of Otago, he researched McCahon’s life and sorted family papers for the Hocken Library. In 2002, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature by Victoria University, which established the Gordon H. Brown Lecture Series ‘in honour of the achievements of the distinguished New Zealand art historian’.

His new book is Towards A Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon (Auckland University Press, 2010). He lives on Waiheke Island.

Books

 "Once the painter was making signs and symbols for people to live by: now he makes things to hang on walls at exhibitions."

So wrote New Zealand artist Colin McCahon as he sought to recapture the values from a time when painting had the strength to sustain the living. McCahon filled his painting with kauri, cliffs, candles and crosses - motifs and symbols he intended as potent reminders of what was important about ourselves and out environment - yet offered little in the way of explanation.

Towards a Promised Land presents fresh insights into the use of these symbols and the underlying complexities of Colin McCahon’s paintings. Tracing McCahon’s life and work, from his student days at King Edward Technical College in Dunedin, through his mentorship under Toss Woollaston and on to his years at the Auckland City Art Gallery and Elam School of Fine Arts, Brown analyses key aspects of the artist’s work: the role of the Bible; his artistic associations and autobiographical reflections; the idea of the promised land; the use of words and numbers; and the significance of the New Zealand landscape in the shaping of a national identity.

A fellow artist and trusted friend of Colin McCahon’s for more than thirty years, Gordon H Brown affords an intimate glimpse of McCahon the man - leading us through his studios and his involvement with the theatre, mediating his late biblical paintings, and pointing out the essential vegetable garden and ‘make do’ housing that were constants in an often turbulent life,

Towards a Promised Land draws on Brown’s many years of writing, thinking and talking about McCahon’s paintings to offer a vivid new portrait of New Zealand’s most distinguished artist.
Auckland University Press, 2010