Salvatore Zofrea's Watercolours and woodcuts at the Nancy Sever Gallery

Salvatore Zofrea has been a larger than life character in the Sydney art scene and is possibly best known for his monumental oil paintings and murals on literary, historical and religious themes, glowing with sensuous colour and also for his romantically inspired portraits.

Born in Calabria in southern Italy, Zofrea emigrated with his family to Australia at the age of 10, in 1956, and came to art through the Julian Ashton School and private classes with Henry V. Justelius. His studio is located at Kurrajong, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, where in more recent years he has found inspiration in Australian flora.

This exhibition is a celebration of botanical fecundity, where Zofrea in his watercolours and woodblock prints examines the native flora, bunched together more as an arrangement than observed in situ. He is an artist who has a mastery of technique with watercolours that breathe and radiate with light, where in a painting such as Australian heather, 2015, detail is picked out with ink and watercolour is allowed to convey the polychrome richness of the flowers.

Similarly, in Australian irises and red wax flowers, 2015, sufficient detail is included to suggest form, at a viewing distance, while the white of the paper is allowed to show through so that the whole composition seems to breathe and the wind and the sun are included in the drawing. It is this vibrancy and virtuosity in the handling of watercolour that gives life to these watercolour drawings.

However, it is the woodcuts that form the backbone of the exhibition and are the strongest part. The sizeable print Christmas bells, flannel flowers and native irises, 2008, is one of several accomplished prints in the exhibition. It immediately brings to mind a parallel with Margaret Preston both in the subject matter and the technique, as well as their common inspiration in Japanese art.

Compositionally, Zofrea is more informal in his structures than Preston and permits a greater complexity with interwoven floral designs printed against a dark background. Like Preston, he carves the shapes out of the woodblock and prints in black ink on paper and subsequently hand-colours his prints employing fresco pigments.

They are pleasing, decorative prints that radiate with joyous energy. Without being able to put my finger on it, Zofrea, even when he celebrates the Australian flora, seems to retain a slight Italian accent, which is much more pronounced in his large oil paintings. His banksias, kangaroo paws and grevilleas are gorgeous floral tributes from someone looking out of a window, admiring them and celebrating them in art – like a visitor who is discovering things for the first time.

Preston, when she was living near the bush at Berowra, seemed to absorb the spirit of the bush and sought to create a national art that was uniquely of this country. Her adaptation of Aboriginal art was naive and heavy-handed, her technique at times was experimental and provocative, especially in her monotypes, but she seemed to approach her subject matter more as a native than as a visitor – even a fabulously talented visitor as is the case with Zofrea.