PROVENANCE Private Collection, Auckland Purchased from RKS Art, 1978

By the 1970s, Pat Hanly was established as the major painter working in the Expressionist style in New Zealand. He had completed major commissions for murals The Seven Ages of Man Medical School Mural for the Auckland School of Medicine (1975) and Rainbow Pieces for the Christchurch Town Hall (1971- 72) as well as the 40-metre-long Prelude to a Journey for the Auckland International Airport's Departure Hall (1977-78). Strong Garden shows him at the height of his powers, painting his own idea of the Garden of Eden in bravura style.

Those who had Hanly as a drawing tutor at the School of Architecture remember following him up to the crater of Maungawhau (Mount Eden), where they would be encouraged to lie on their backs contemplating scudding clouds. The energy in Nature, the electrical charge of trees thrashing in the wind, or plants bursting into bloom in a suburban garden, always captured his imagination. You can see it captured here in the chaotic splashes and dribbles that enliven the looming tree forms in the top half of this painting. It is as if he sees into the structure of the vegetation, catching photosynthesis in action, and translates it into crackling and sizzling paintwork.

While cool greens, yellows and blues dominate the upper part of the work, he saves his hottest colours for the reclining red figure in the foreground who basks on a velvety field of green carpeting over what looks like the molten magma of the Auckland volcanic field. Hanly had honed his figure painting skills in London where he had painted his Showgirl series celebrating the female form. His Figures in Light series, begun in the 1960s, was a paeon to sunbathing and the South Pacific, with Matisse-like nudes reclining in splendour in bright light.

Outlining his forms in fresh white paint, he created a halo around plants and people alike, commenting in the literary journal Islands at the time, It is my intention to communicate...the whole magnificence of being - being a human being, being a bird, being grass, being the hedge, being the sky. I hope all these elements/ objects, or conditions, are drawn together, after much thought, to such a pitch of energy through the medium of paint, that a kind of still harmony occurs...Art these days, for me, is trying to make revelation apparent and revelation means to me wondrous awareness.

Hanly's wife Gil is an accomplished gardener and photographer, and the growing seasons of spring and summer would spur him into action to capture the enjoyment of humans communing with Nature. Yet he wanted his work to do more than decorate walls. Those who see only the garden see nothing he once remarked, alluding to how he would internalise his verdant subjects as he painted them, fusing his ability to wield his painterly skills with the idea of cultivating a flourishing garden. In 1976 he ventured into word paintings by spelling out Joy, Love and Paint in threads of enamel paint over the surface of a square board. Another work which he titled Pure Painting enjoined viewers to love each other. While his works often packed a political punch, he was also the master of painting as a celebration of the pleasure of creation.

LINDA TYLER