Thanks everybody.
As for Matisse, I hadn't consciously thought of him, but I do like his cutouts better than most of his earlier work.
There is an interesting Matisse exhibit at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, mostly of objects that he collected and then made paintings from. Tom the objects were fascinating, but most of the paintings seemed to me to pale in comparison. Often I was thinking, "He shoulda used a camera."
My tree roots are much more heavily processed than I am accustomed to, but once I hit on this high contrast effect with the subdued background, I decided I liked it.
-Eric