Artworks

Provenance

Avery was a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in 1953, 1954 and 1956, and the Averys also spent the Summer of 1955 in residence at Yaddo. In later interviews, Sally Avery shared vivid recollections of their encounters with Thornton Wilder, Marcel Duchamp, James Baldwin, May Swenson, Marian MacDowell and others. The New Hampshire countryside, in particular, inspired Avery, and those years are associated, in particular, with his explorations of its trees and wooded landscapes.

While Untitled (Blue Tree) is painted in watercolour, it is painted on the paper Avery used for his monotypes. It has much the freedom and spontaneity of the monotypes, and the vibrant shimmer of its blues is enhanced by the texture of the paper itself.

“Avery’s spaces hover between subjective feeling and empirical observation… Avery depicts ‘a world elsewhere’. This ‘elsewhere’ is the space that Avery made his own, poised between a social/natural dimension and that of the mind’s eye. Just when one thinks Avery is leaving the Massachusetts coastline or meadow for some airy domain of his own fantasising, he arrests us with a whimsical moo-cow, standing like a lone reminder of earthy existence in the midst of our vista. In turn, when the danger of lapsing into workaday visual prose looms, he will cause a single tree to dissolve into eggshell blue iciness like a frigid burning bush.” David Anfam (2004) pp. 5-6

Exhibitions

Publications