To help raise money for Paint New Zealand Beautiful, WOMAN Magazine is auctioning off this beautiful piece of artwork by NZ artist Anna Evans.

When 11-year-old Anna Evans woke up in a motel room on the edge of Takapuna Beach on her first morning in Aotearoa, she was dazzled by the vivid colours of sea and sky. It was an influential moment that has gone on to inform her work as an adult artist. “It was nothing short of a spiritual experience,” she says. “An intense explosion of orange, reds, purples and pinks set behind a stunning row of palms and Norfolk pines (back then I called them ‘pineapple and Lego trees’).” The contrast between the northern hemisphere light she and her parents left behind when they emigrated and this bright new world left a lasting impression on Anna, whose landscape paintings are imbued with the interaction of sunrise and sunset. “I remember wondering in the initial months of moving to New Zealand if it was all just a dream. Would I wake up from this colour-saturated land into the dull-toned greyness of Northern Manchester? The sky here seemed unnaturally blue, and the sea actual turquoise. There were greens I had never noticed before, adorned by trees that came in shapes my young brain thought impossible.” Anna spent hours as a child copying scenes from her Marvel comic collection, which she would then swap for tuck-shop treats at school. Her biggest creative journey, though, happened in high school, under the influence and encouragement of artist and teacher Matt Elwood, who steered her towards a fine arts degree. At Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, she found herself in pretty good company, with peers Judy Millar, Peter Robinson and Michael Parekowhai, and Don Binney as one of her lecturers. During her time there, she began to see the world of art in new and exciting ways and to question her work and explore creatively. Anna’s landscapes and birds have a dreamlike surrealism, which she credits to the way in which her first impressions of Aotearoa were formed