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 (1970), in the Fletcher Trust Collection). Here, Albrecht uses a highly gestural and expressionistic application in contrast to her later acrylic on canvas method of sweeping a colour-laden brush across the surface in huge bands. 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’.