Garden

This early watercolour is part of Gretchen Albrecht’s extensive Garden series, in which she adopted imagery not unlike Pat Hanly’s of the same period (see, for example, Garden Awake). Michael Dunn has commented that Hanly and Albrecht’s garden paintings ‘share a colourful and optimistic mood, striking a positive note quite unlike the darkness and despair often found in New Zealand painting’. The expressionist brush strokes in this work would soon give way to sweeping bands of colour, as in Cerise Sky.