| Gretchen Albrecht |
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Born in 1943, Auckland, New Zealand Gretchen Albrecht graduated from the Auckland University School of Fine Arts in 1963 and 1981 was awarded the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago, Dunedin.. She was awarded grants from the QEII Arts Council 1976, 1978 and 1986. Albrecht has participated in many travelling group exhibitions among them; NZ/NY (New York 1983), NZ Art Today (Chicago 1986), Distance Looks Our Way (Spain and the Netherlands 1993), Reclaiming the Madonna (England) and has had two solo exhibitions in London. ‘AFTERnature’, a survey of her work curated by the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, toured New Zealand in 1986 and in 1998 the Sarjeant Gallery curated a second Albrecht exhibition, ‘Crossing the Divide’, which explores the link between Gretchen’s prints and paintings. Highly regarded as a colourist, Albrecht continues to engage with abstraction in a personal and lyrical manner. In July, 2000, Gretchen Albrecht spent a week in Christchurch to work on a new series of lithographs at PaperGraphica. An exhibition of her work "Crossing the Divide: a painter makes prints" is currently touring and Marian Maguire asked about the relationship between her paintings and prints. GA. Well, the exhibition looks at how one feeds into the other, how ideas in paintings get transformed into print and how some of that transmutes into new ideas purely because I’m using a different medium. These can then re-influence the paintings. I’ve found all this really useful and didn’t realise it was going to happen when I embarked on printmaking. MM. Your early prints used a linear form of drawing which you are not using now. Why is that? GA. I have discovered I can treat each stone like a page of watercolour paper and maybe the linear aspect comes through in the use of the geometries that sit over and in these washes. MM. You were saying that different ideas emerge through your large canvasses and the lithographs. I wondered if you see less difference between the prints and gouaches? GA. I see them as being quite different. With printmaking I go through a number of steps to accommodate the process and the mechanical aspect has a major part to play. I am not in control totally of the medium, and am surprised, sometimes, at the ability of the stone to speak back. I also find it very satisfying to work on these big slabs of stone and the way that the stone reveals itself with the wash flowing on to it - that is a minor miracle. There are a lot of things that are brought to bear in the making of a print that are not there in a work on paper and I am finding that I am enjoying working on paper through my printmaking more than gouache at the moment. MM. It’s more of a challenge, maybe, dealing with all those thinking steps to get to a final image. GA. Yes, I like the challenge. It opens me up. MM. Sometimes I have a concern that when artists make prints at the studio they have moved away from the very . intimate .experience they have making paintings. They are working in an environment with other people present, where the stone is taken away from them for processing and printing. They then have to deal with the results of the proofing in a less immediate way than in painting. I wondered if you found the break in intimacy a problem? MM. Well I find the reverse. I find the working on the stone a very intimate process. It is small in its scale and brings things down to a level in which I am very close to the work. The stone is just eighteen inches away and my vision and gesture are brought in, in a very involving way. In my own studio the paintings start on the floor requiring large gestures, body oriented with lots of physical activity, in which I am moving around the large stretcher, sometimes straddling, sometimes bending over it. All of these actions are on a big scale, less intimate than working on a stone in somebody else’s workshop. The private nature of painting occurs i |
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Gretchen Albrecht work featured on this site: |
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