Artworks

Cows are a constant throughout Avery’s oeuvre, all the way back to 1930, when he and his wife Sally, spent the summer in rural Collinsville, Connecticut, following and sketching herds of pasturing cows. One of his great canvases of 1930, Bucolic Landscape, is a frieze of five cows. And Landscape, the 12-foot post office mural he created during his time as a WPA artist, depicts a landscape with cows. Cows are emblematic, as well, in the work of his Vermont summers, but we find major canvases depicting cows in all the decades of his career. For Avery, they seem the embodiment of serenity – often of collective harmony. Grazing Brahmins is a Florida motif, inspired by Avery’s winters as a fellow at the Research Studio in Maitland. Florida’s majestic white Brahmin cows and bulls were a favorite subject – they are even the motif of two monotypes. His paintings Brahmin and Palms, 1952, and Brahmin Bulls, 1951 are close in palette to Grazing Brahmins. But Avery delighted in much of Florida’s flora and fauna, as well as its lakes, rivers and swamps, and there is a whole body of work with Florida as subject. While it is infrequent in his work, in Grazing Brahmins Avery used a particular compositional device: “Sometimes a bold abstract form will be decorated with recognizable, though simplified representations of animals or people.” Edward Lucie-Smith (2001) p. 14 In this case, the tilted and flattened verdant pastureland encloses an abstract form that is a turquoise lake, from which some of the cows drink. Avery used a similar device, much simplified, in his paintings Seven White Cows of 1953 and Goat Island, 1958. We find it, as well, in another Florida painting Twisting River of 1951.