March Avery Fall Bouquet, 1999

Avery’s paintings unfold like scenes from a diary, capturing quotidian scenes of family life, friendship, leisure, introspection, and quiet observation. From intimate domestic interiors to sunlit beaches and contemplative mountain ranges, her work draws directly from lived experience. Beginning with reality, Avery gradually shifts toward abstraction, transforming figures and settings into radiant blocks of saturated color and simplified form. As we let our eyes run over her canvasses, however, each form turns into an inexhaustible intensity: scarlet red, immersive lilac, sage green, pale blue, mustard yellow, tender emerald, to name a few of the honeytrap shades which draw the eye closer. Each of these shades luminous while gentle, rubs against and compliments the others.

Born in 1932 to the painters Sally Michel and Milton Avery, she was surrounded by artists and avant-gardists from an early age. Avery grew up during a period when artists, scholars, and leftists fled Europe to relocate to the United States. Not surprisingly, perhaps, she received her primary training from her parents and was heavily influenced by their studio practice. Rooted in a modernist lineage yet resolutely personal in vision, Avery described her life-long fascination with color as follows: “I think I was painting in utero.”