Colin McCahon has written that his first artistic experience was watching a sign-painter writing “Hairdresser and Tobacconist” on a shop front. “The grace of the lettering as it arched across the window in gleaming gold, suspended on its dull red field but leaping free from its own black shadow, pointed to a new and magnificent world of painting. I watched from outside as the artist working inside slowly separated himself from me (and light from dark) to make his new creation.” Later, when McCahon himself became an artist, he too used other people’s messages, copying passages from the Bible and