Garden

This early watercolour is part of Auckland artist Gretchen Albrecht’s extensive garden series in which she adopted imagery not unlike Pat Hanly’s of the same period (see the collection’s Hanly Garden Awake 1970). Here Albrecht uses a highly gestural and expressionistic brush application in contrast to her later acrylic on canvas method of sweeping a colour laden brush across the surface in huge horizontal bands. Michael Dunn comments of their garden paintings that Hanly and Albrecht “share a colourful and optimistic mood, striking a positive note quite unlike the darkness and despair often found in New Zealand painting.”