East Jamaica Road 1943

Milton Avery made this pencil drawing, East Jamaica Road, in an undated sketchbook. Look at these scribbly, scrawly lines! Imagine Avery out there, maybe a little chilly, quickly trying to capture the essence of a place. It's not about getting every detail perfect; it's about feeling the space, the light, the way things clump together. I think it’s a landscape, but there are scribbles over scribbles, and the landscape has to fight its way through all that erasure. You see that one area where he wrote "blue" something? Maybe he was thinking about color, even in this grayscale sketch. Avery was so good at simplifying things, boiling them down to their basic shapes and colors in his paintings. Even in this simple sketch, you can see him working through those ideas, trying to find the core of what he sees. Artists, we’re all just talking to each other, across time. We riff on each other’s ideas, steal a little, and add our own spin.