Gaspe Pink Sky 1940

Curator: Milton Avery's "Gaspe Pink Sky," painted in 1940, hums with a quiet sort of magic, doesn’t it? I’m immediately drawn to the way the muted pink washes over everything. Editor: Yes, it's visually striking. The pigment has a tactile quality and looks almost like fresco with its matt surface. I immediately notice the simple, flat planes of color forming the landscape and the houses clustered so quaintly. Curator: Quaint, yes, but there’s something bolder happening, too. Avery pares everything down to its essence – a few shapes, a wash of color. The feeling is both serene and a bit unsettling. I keep feeling a strange calm, maybe its linked to the scene with sheeps, small houses, and a lonesome church. The artist creates this incredible space with so little, which is astonishing and it really draws one to appreciate landscape paintings. Editor: Absolutely. Avery’s method, and possibly the limited palette that he might had at the time during the heat of WW2 in Europe, reveals a preoccupation with materiality, where colour and form converge in deceptively simple structures that prompt our reflection to the material limits of abstraction at the time. There's something grounding in that simplicity and the emphasis on painting that you can see across expressionist works of that time. Curator: Grounding… That’s a beautiful way to put it. And he certainly invites our minds to roam, I love that the sheep up the horizon appear almost dreamlike in this sea of watercolor paint. It speaks volumes of Avery's dedication to see beyond superficialities, to tap into some shared felt experience. He does this through pure shape and feeling. Editor: Well, and perhaps Avery, as so many artist during times of distress, found in common labor and rural communities, a model, so his materials mirror the resources of the land and its human impact. His artistic practice is rooted, quite literally, in the ground. And I am also sure that the fact that painting in oil on canvas also allowed to add some depth to his final output. Curator: So, as we walk away from “Gaspe Pink Sky,” maybe we take a moment to consider where *our* ground is, where our anchor in the world exists and what gives us, perhaps, this kind of luminous, grounded peace? Editor: Indeed, reflecting how the humblest materials when arranged through dedicated effort, whether oil or watercolor, offers more meaning than one initially assumes and allows for endless exploration.