In Makaro, Gordon Walters has used a much more subtle colour combination than the stark black and white of his best-known koru paintings.
Almost a decade after creating this painting, Walters declared that his koru works were ‘best in black and white or in one colour on white, and I am limiting all my new ones to this range’. In fact, he never stopped experimenting with colour.
In the 1980s, he applied the subtle tonal contrasts of Makaro to several works, including Kura.