View of Wordens Hill 1943

Milton Avery made this energetic sketch of Wordens Hill with a pen on paper. The page is filled with hatched, scribbled lines. A tall bare tree stands on the left, and a long hill stretches across the background. You can almost imagine Avery outside with his sketchbook, quickly capturing the scene before him. The pen moves so fast that it turns into a kind of seismograph, picking up all the earth's vibrations. Notice how Avery lets the lines pile up to create darker, denser areas, like the trunk of the tree. The strokes feel rushed, intuitive, capturing the essential forms without getting bogged down in details. I love how this sketch embodies a sense of immediacy. It reminds me of the work of other artists, like Guston, whose late-career drawings have a similar raw, expressive quality. Artists are constantly in dialogue with each other across time, borrowing and riffing on each other's ideas. It is a reminder that art is an ongoing conversation rather than a series of isolated pronouncements.