Michael Moore was born in the Wairarapa in 1956 and he currently lives near Cambridge in the district of Waikato. A self-taught artist he began to paint fulltime in 1990 and his images often capture typical aspects of the New Zealand landscape in ‘series.’ He was artist in residence at Te Awaite, a historic coastal sheep station in the Wairarapa, in 1994. A series of his paintings in the mid 1990s ‘The Parched Earth’ resulted from a visit the artist made to drought-stricken Hawkes Bay.

Moore’s subject matter often comprises iconic features of the local environment such as rolling hills, the well-known landform Mount Taranaki, deep river gorges and native flora such as the cabbage tree, nikau palm and flax. His use of these landscape elements gives his paintings a strong association with the land and evokes notions of national and cultural identity. His colours are crisp and bright and his paintings often depict voluminous landforms populated with lush green foliage and crowned by clear, blue skies. He is frequently drawn back to areas with dramatic landforms such as the Wairarapa, the South Island’s West Coast and the Kapiti Coast north of Wellington.

Taken from http://www.artaid.org.nz/?page_id=307