By 1933 Rata Lovell-Smith was at the forefront of what became known as Canterbury Regionalism, a style of painting that focused on the unique features of the Waitaha Canterbury landscape. She was one of the region’s most progressive painters, and Hawkins, which focuses on the small White Cliffs Branch railway station, highlights her distinctive, sharp style of landscape painting. A reviewer at the time glowingly commented on her work, writing: She glories in the colour contrasts of the New Zealand landscape. […] Here are no subtleties but a series of vivid and simplified impressions of her native country. […T]here can never be any doubt about the locality of Mrs Lovell-Smith’s landscapes. It is a little as though she had never got over her first impression of violent tone and colour contrasts, and in a state of beatific astonishment had set herself to establish that impression at the expense of anything that tended to modify it.

(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)