When the artist Gretchen Albrecht was at Auckland’s Mt Roskill Primary School, “There were great end-of-the-year sort of grand marches and fancy dress things. And I went as a daffodil.” Her “darling” mother made her a costume out of yellow and green crêpe paper, “with petals and a little cap for the stalk. It was beautiful.”
Albrecht is referred to in art world terms as an “eminent artist”; one of the “most notable” of New Zealand painters; having had, and still having, “a distinguished career”.
Which makes her sound grand, somewhat formidable. The idea of an interview with an eminent artist is a little daunting. She hates that “career”, by the way. “I think it’s ill-suited to the creative arts.”
As for the rest of it, she thinks those terms simply mean she is 81 and “still here”.
She is not remotely daunting to talk to. And I love that endearing “I went as a daffodil.” I would very much have liked to have seen a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Daffodil. Alas, no photograph exists. “I don’t know why my parents didn’t take photos of me and my daffodil costume. But I remember it very fondly.”
She had a lovely childhood growing up in the suburbs, in Onehunga, in a perfectly ordinary family. She had three siblings and two wonderful parents. Dad Reuben was a builder. He stretched her canvases until he was in his 80s. When his hands got too shaky to safely use a skillsaw, her youngest brother took over. “And so it’s been a family business.” Mother Joyce was clever but had no opportunity for higher education. “So I think she saw me as the first in the family to go to university.” She remembers coming home from school the day she first walked into the art room at Mt Roskill Grammar School and saying, “I want to be an artist.” She was 12.
She was bright and in the academic stream, which meant French. You couldn’t do art and French. Her parents, who, she says, were eternally supportive, immediately said yes. She had to persuade the headmaster to let her take art. Even at 12, you can see she could be persuasive. And the rest, you might say, is art history.
She remembers her childhood as fondly as she does being a daffodil. “I didn’t really want to become a grown-up.” I wondered if she had entirely grown up – because there is something endlessly youthful, and playful, in reaching the age of 81 and spending your days mucking about with paint.
That might not be the most scholarly way of describing what she does. I don’t think she’ll object. I read her a scholarly description of one of her works, In a Shower of Gold, which is in the Te Papa collection and includes this: “… the underlying rhythms of a natural, mythological cosmos”. Art talk can be like a foreign language. That “mythological cosmos”, for example, is tricky to decipher. “I certainly wouldn’t have written that myself. I know what you’re saying. It’s a complicating factor for people to enter the work through.”
Canvases talk back
Liquid States, a major survey of Albrecht’s work, has opened at Titirangi’s Te Uru gallery and continues until February 2. There is a wonderful photograph of her in the book accompanying the exhibition, taken in 1985 in a studio in Quay St, Auckland. She is kneeling over a painting and if you squint a bit, you can imagine she is making a finger painting. That is a flight of fancy, but a nice one – I can imagine her doing finger painting. She says, in response to my question about whether she has entirely grown up, “I guess mostly. My studio assistant, who is sitting beside me doing amazing things on the computer, because that is not my strength, says I’m mostly grown up.” She is not averse to a flight of fancy. She says her canvases talk to her. Do canvases ever make jokes? “No. But when they speak, I know what to do. I no longer wrestle my canvases in arm locks to the floor. I wait. I give them time.”
I wanted to know whether she is bossy. You might make an assumption that she is, just a bit, because she is forthright. She can be crisp. She likes clear thinking. You wouldn’t want to make a fool of yourself in her company. I ask her assistant, Nikki Barrett. Albrecht answers for her. “She’s not allowed to say anything nasty.”
She is talking to me from her Auckland home. She gardens. Her garden is “absolutely beautiful. It’s my pride and joy. I’ve never had such beautiful roses in my life as I have this year. Just cascades of tumbling roses and a mad mix of them with ancient old cycads and beautiful Poor Knights Lily clumps and a lot of, oh, what the hell are they called? Bromeliads, yeah.”
Is there anything about her house that, from the outside, says an artist lives here? “Hopefully not, because I love my privacy and I don’t want people knocking on my door, wanting to meet the artist.” Does she know why people want to meet the artist? “Well, I guess it’s like when I go to the Readers and Writers [Festival] … and I want to see the person who wrote a book that I had fallen in love with. But, of course, it doesn’t make the book either better or worse.
I no longer wrestle my canvases in arm locks to the floor. I wait. I give them time.
“I guess it’s just a sort of putting a shape and a name and a presence to the work. It’s not important, though, because I can go and see a Vermeer painting or a Rembrandt or a Goya and love it. But I don’t feel an urge to meet the artists.” That’s just as well. She’d have to dig them up. “It’s true! But, you know, similarly with contemporary artists, I don’t need to meet the artist.”
She rarely goes to openings these days. “It’s too tiring. I go to my own and, of course, they’re very tiring. But it’s more to do with the fact that they’re on at a time when I quite like to be sitting on my own sofa having a gin and tonic. “I make an effort if it’s a close friend. But my days of standing around in great big crowds making small talk are pretty much over.” I wondered if she was any good at making small talk and she says: “Oh, I can’t tolerate small talk.” Barrett pipes up to contradict this. She says Albrecht is very good at small talk. “Oh. There we go.” So, she is capable of putting on a performance. “If required.”
Creative space
Do not knock on her studio door hoping to meet the artist. She won’t let you in. She hardly lets anybody in. She hates people being in her studio. “Yes. I prefer to be in my studio on my own. And, you know, that is respected by any assistants I’ve had over the years. A lot of Nikki’s work is working with the computer … All of this is techie work, which I don’t want to learn and which she is trained to do. Somehow.”
All of her work is meticulously archived in specially made storage units and on the computer. The historical record of her work spans more than 60 years. Another word for a historical record is legacy. “Well, another word for it is provenance. And provenance is very important, especially when I die and things appear, and if they don’t have a good provenance then they can be queried.”
She likes to know where her paintings go. She regards them as her children. “They need to be loved.” Selling her children might be a wrench. “Well, some works, of course I keep back.” All of the works in Liquid States are from private collections. Many have never been exhibited.
You can do what you like in the studio without fear of anybody observing and thinking, you know, ‘What a whacko.’
Does she know why she paints? “It’s an essential part of me being a human. I can’t explain it but without painting I would not feel fully formed.” Perhaps it doesn’t bear examination. Perhaps it’s a form of magic. “Well, things happen. And I guess the alchemy of creating a painting is as surprising to me as, hopefully, it would be if a viewer felt something looking at a work.”
The works from the 80s in Liquid States represent and reflect a change in her work, she says. In 1978, during a three-month road trip across the US and Europe, she saw contemporary and ancient art for the first time outside New Zealand.
“When I came back, my work changed. So the 80s reflect a change that starts to inflect itself in new work.” The hemisphere paintings were first created in the 80s. They are instantly recognisable as Albrecht’s: luminous sweeping celebrations of paint have become her signature.
A mother and student
Albrecht has been married to artist James Ross since 1970. But at 18, she was a student at Elam School of Fine Arts and married with a child, Andrew. He’s now 63 and a mathematics and statistics associate professor at a US university. When the marriage broke up, she moved back in with her parents, and her mother took over childcare so Albrecht could continue her education.
Andrew had a relationship with his father, who has since died. He calls Ross his dad. Andrew is in the wedding photo wearing a brown corduroy suit. She wore a hippyish long velvety frock and a long scarf. Ross wore a leather jacket, a tie and white jeans. It was the 70s. She admits to owning “a crocheted jerkin”.
The very idea now makes her laugh. “Every graduate from university in the 70s was heading to the hills, weren’t they? I mean, it was the golden age of when people lived communally. Anyway, that wasn’t us. We were sensible. We had a house built in the bush and we lived there as a family.”
So, crocheted vest notwithstanding, they never embraced the excesses of hippydom. They weren’t stoned all the time, for one thing. “No! Of course not. We’re not that sort of people. No. Well, even in those days, not even that, actually. No, I think we were fairly sort of pure.”
She was never one for such shenanigans. “I am a very sensible sort of person.” She’s a practical sort. “You know, I came from a very practical family. I can whip up a batch of marmalade blindfolded, let alone a lovely batch of date scones. I was born, well, in 1943, and was brought up in a make-do and practical household, and of course, when you’re an adult you do reflect some of those traits.”
For In a Shower of Gold (2011), she came up with a kind of “Heath Robinson” construction of planks and concrete blocks. I have a vision of her clambering about on this apparatus, which sounds practical and innovative. And a bit nutty. “Well, the point is that the stretchers were so huge I couldn’t actually get into the middle of the canvas without having the platform thingy rigged up.” It still might be a bit nutty. She doesn’t care. “I did it all by myself. Nobody saw me. You can do what you like in the studio without fear of anybody observing and thinking, you know, ‘What a whacko.’”
She doesn’t appear to be particularly whacky. But it was certainly unusual for a 12-year-old girl to decide she was going to be an artist. And being a full-time artist requires a leap of faith, at the very least. In other words, being an artist is a slightly unconventional thing to be.
I was trying to figure whether she was an unconventional sort of person. “Am I? I don’t see myself as a conventional person. But I’m not out there on the edge of things. I wouldn’t say that we live conventional lives. I do remember when my son was young and he came home from school and said: ‘Why don’t you go to work like normal people?’”
Just a bit unconventional, then. I think she really does wait for her canvases to talk to her. That she really did once wrestle them to the floor. It is tempting to imagine that she gets up to any manner of whacky things in her studio. Just don’t go peering in through the window (if there is a window) in an attempt to find out.
