In 1979 the artist Derrick Greaves, who has died aged 95, visited the Negev desert, in southern Israel, and observed the vivid paradox of the apparently cracked surface of the barren waste invaded by flowers springing up overnight. The resulting pared-down works that he produced for an exhibition in Britain and Tel Aviv built on a push towards abstraction that had started in the 1960s. Later, he borrowed motifs from the Ukiyo-e masters of woodblock printing Hokusai and Hiroshige, and finessed them for his own ends, attracted in part by the flatness that had haunted western artists since the late 19th century.
Later still he took inspiration from some of Georges Braque’s greatest canvases: large interiors of his studio, each overlaid with a bird in full flight, an image that Greaves refined further for his own purposes, as in Shangri-La (Two Exotic Birds) from 2002. Greaves’s line had always been strong and pure, and in his Shangri-La series, intended to provide an uplifting response to the horrors of the Iraq war, his art of line, silhouette and colour reached an exquisite peak.
