About the work
Brightly coloured bouquets of flowers, blossoming farmhouse gardens and colourful summer meadows, pale pink cherry tree branches in spring and dark red asters in autumn, wild roses at the side of the path and verdant rhododendron bushes beneath gnarled oaks - there is hardly another Worpswede painter that dedicated themselves so passionately to motifs like these as Lisel Oppel. Again and again, she captured poppy and larkspur, wild daffodils and hyacinths, flaming orange lilies and majestic roses on canvas in all their facets.
The "Garten am Weyerberg" is one of her quiet, reserved paintings. It doesn’t live from the wealth of colours of luxuriant summer blooms, but instead presents the first tiny heralds of spring in a garden bed. Rose-coloured Bellis perennis, orange-red wallflowers and pale blue forget-me-nots pertly stretch their noses out of the brown earth. With this seemingly randomly chosen excerpt in atmospheric, saturated colouring, Lisel Oppel succeeds in providing an unspectacular, intimate view of nature just reawakening after the winter.
The vernal nature study was created in 1947, at a time of great sacrifice, in which the painter occupied the modest two rooms of a small Worpswede hut together with her son Claudio and traded her paintings for sausage and bacon. However, she was able, as we see in this painting, to de-emphasise the hard reality of these years in her work in favour of hopeful moments and the more cheerful aspects of life. Some even rhapsodised on the "painter in the white dress with a face framed in curls”, including the author Gustav Schenk, who appreciated both her "buoyant sensuality" and "the perfection and genuineness of the picturesque" with flowery words.
(Doris Hansmann)
