Born in Amsterdam, Fred Schimmel's family immigrated to South Africa around his twentieth birthday. Here he began work as an apprentice in a commercial artists studio, which would come to bear a signifi cant influence on the graphic quality of his work. Sun and Trees is typical of Schimmel's early paintings in which he uses landscape scenes as the starting point for vivid explorations into line, surface and color. Esmé Berman describes that the subject matter was not an end in itself: "These are abstract vistas: it is the relationship of forms in space and the communication of physical and psychological atmosphere which interest him." The psychological aspect is indeed present in this painting in which an anamorphic tree seems to rise from ...