"Old Masters fetch a much better price than old mistresses" - Lord Beaverbrook (1879 – 1964)
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White and Violet Flowers of the Mediterranean

Shortly after his return to the Italian riviera from north east Queensland in the Australian tropics, Matthew Moss painted this canvas. It still contains some of the elements he had acquired painting in the mangrove swamps of Mission Beech; the flowers' stems mirror the twisted roots and trunks of the tropical plants emerging from the clay and mud of the marshes. 'White and Violet Flowers of the Mediterranean' still contains some of symbol-like elements of Roberto Matta's paintings that had so impressed Matthew in the surrealist artist's Piazza di Spagna exhibitions in Rome in the first half of the 1960s. More evident in the painting's overall composition, the massed forms of the elements dominating the centre is Moss' debt to the Berlinois Wols (Otto Wolfgang Schulz) an 1940s 'informel' precursor of the New York school of 1950s abstract expressionism.

Flowers and Trees are available for book illustrations, annual reports, paper and packaging, giftware, related products. You can license them in the following format: Original transparencies in 6 x 6 cm. (2¼ in.) format, high-resolution RGB drum scans on DVD or efficient and quick E-Mail or FTP upload.