Featured Help with artist signature on a 'Where's Waldo' style painting

This is a painting I found at a yard sale over week end - is the signature Matta? Malta?

It's a beautiful winter landscape at first, but if you look at it longer it's like a 'Where's Waldo?'painting when you see they painted a small house in the middle of the woods that you can only see partially - it's also the only color in the painting & it's so small compared to the rest it's easy to miss if you don't look hard.

Unusual right?

 

It's pretty , and I like the house hidden in the woods Looks like Matta to me - could be wrong though. The offset litho dot pattern is clearly present in your last pic - so not a painting, a print.

 

Very weird originally this was a print but if you look at the white parts it's actual paint. It looks to be as if someone went over the print with white paint? Not sure why?

 

I do see that now, yes. My father did many pen and ink drawings, and had them reproduced for sale (not offset litho but some other type of print) - he would hand color a limited number of them with watercolor and sell them as hand colored signed prints.

 

I think it's VERY COOL and I LOVE it!!!! Two areas of color....two buildings....beautiful scene!!!! House or barn up in far right corner! Looks also like it just as easily could be Motta!!

 

We'd have to be hands-on with that piece to be sure just what it was. There's clearly hand-coloring all over the place, which appears to be watercolor, you can see texture from a thicker application of paint (or artist's white, or white-out) just northeast of the signature, and the dot pattern doesn't make sense for a pen-&-ink line drawing -- it's remotely (remotely) possible the artist applied that himself or herself with Ben-Day or Zipatone...

 

I think the "M" is a first name initial.