Vermont Landscape 1943

This is Milton Avery’s Vermont Landscape, a pencil sketch on paper. It’s hard to date it exactly, but we can see Avery working out the scene with a flurry of lines. It’s all about process here, watching him think. Looking at the scribbled foreground, it's a thicket of marks, a real density of line that makes it seem like the foliage is almost pushing forward, right into our space. Then, higher up, the lines become more sparse, more delicate. See how he captures the receding planes of the landscape with these changes of mark? There's a lightness to the touch overall. It reminds me a little of Guston's late drawings, the way they both use repetition and simple means to suggest so much. And like Guston, Avery shows us that it’s not about perfect representation, but about feeling and suggestion. Art is not about fixed meanings, but it is an exchange of ideas.