MCCAHON, Colin, 1919-1987
Let us Possess One World (Painting)
McCahon’s left-handed writing wins no prizes for
neatness. In Let us possess one world, lower case letters
crowd together, shuffled by punctuation into a
tripartite scheme so that one world is hoisted
proudly on a stem above the mirrored halves
below. Whereas the staid pronouncements of his
earlier word paintings (I Am and I and Thou) were
freighted with significance by the use of cubist
capitals, this looping script dips into the sensuality
of the source, John Donne’s seventeenth century
love poem.