View of Wordens Hill 1943

Milton Avery made this landscape sketch on a page from a notebook, using a pencil. It’s a loose, dreamy rendering of a landscape that’s all about capturing a feeling, not describing a place, even though we know it as Wordens Hill. It’s interesting that there is a sense of speed and directness in the marks, yet everything feels soft and hazy, like a distant memory. Look how Avery uses hatching and scribbling to create tonal variation, and how the white of the page is as important as the marks themselves. The tall tree to the left is rendered with a series of quick, diagonal strokes, and these same kind of marks are repeated to evoke the foliage, land and sky. There's a bit of the ghost of Cezanne in Avery’s reductive approach to landscape. Like Cezanne, Avery is less interested in illusion than in conveying the subjective experience of seeing and feeling. This is a piece about the artist's encounter with the world, about process, and about the joy of drawing.