After early figurative and expressionist works, Gretchen Albrecht turned to painting still-life compositions, before coming into her own as a robust colourist with a major series of large-scale landscapes in the mid-1970s. Her personal experience of the paintings of American Colour Field painter Morris Louis in an exhibition at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1971 intensified her interest in the psychological and expressive effects of the use of flat areas of intense colour in painting. Living out west in Konini Road in Titirangi from 1973 until 1982 gave her the opportunity to visit the nearby beaches at Karekare and Piha soaking up inspiration from the wild west coast.

Staining her canvas with acrylic paint allowed her to achieve light veils of transparent colour which lift and float like silk scarves in the wind. Here she has rendered a sunset brewing over the sea as bands of a brilliant rainbow. A sense of immensity is achieved in the horizontal expansiveness, but also the effect of movement, perhaps of the sea surging, and the clouds gathering as the sun dips below the horizon. Hovering between abstraction and representation, Albrecht’s paintings in this period were described approvingly by critic Hamish Keith as resembling the layers in a Victorian sand bottle.