The Creative Life of Milton Avery: ‘Why Talk When You Can Paint?’

Husband and Wife, 1945 by Milton Avery. © 2022 Milton Avery Trust/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York and DACS, London

‘I always take something out of my pictures, strip the design to essentials. The facts do not interest me so much as the essentials of nature.'
Milton Avery

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the work of American artist Milton Avery (Royal Academy, London until 16 October).

From working class stock, Avery took factory jobs to sustain him while he studied art. Continuing to attend night classes and visiting galleries at the weekend, for the most part he laboured in obscurity, creating a painting every day in his small New York apartment. Never affiliated to any particular group, he created a bridge between American Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism and inspired younger artists to follow their own path. 

Avery teaches us a good deal about living a truly creative life.

‘I never have any rules to follow. I follow myself.’

Born in 1885 in Altmar, New York, the son of a tanner, Avery grew up in Connecticut. He left school at 16 and spent a decade working in different blue-collar jobs - as an aligner, an assembler, a latheman and a mechanic.

With a view to acquiring more lucrative skills, Avery enrolled in an evening class in ‘commercial lettering’ at the Connecticut League of Art Students. Soon after, his tutor advised him to transfer to life drawing. In 1917 he began working nights in order to paint in the daytime. 

Blue Trees, 1945 (Collection Neuberger Museum of Art)

From the Impressionists Avery adopted the practice of drawing and painting outdoors, en plein air. His early work captured the essential beauty of blossoming trees, peaceful rivers, big skies and setting suns.

In 1924 Avery met Sally Michel, a young art student, and two years later they married and moved to New York. Her income as a commercial illustrator enabled him to devote himself more fully to painting. 

The Averys spent the summer months in the country, where he made sketches and painted watercolours. Once back in New York, he translated these into oils in their modest apartment. (He didn’t have a studio.)

'Nature is my springboard. From her I get my initial impetus. I have tried to relate the visible drama of mountains, trees, and bleached fields with the fantasy of wind blowing and changing colors and forms.'

Avery’s daughter March recalls that he approached his art ‘like a factory worker.’

‘He was always painting in the living room…He would get up, have breakfast – coffee and an English muffin – and get to work. At noon, break for lunch. He would then paint in the afternoon until about 5 pm.'
March Avery Cavanaugh

March in Brown, 1954.
Oil on canvas. 111.8 x 81.3 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Victoria Miro, London

Avery was a taciturn man. Days would go by without him saying a word. 

‘Why talk when you can paint?’

The Averys spent every Saturday visiting galleries and museums, including, from 1929, the newly opened Museum of Modern Art. They regularly hosted soirees, their guests including young artists Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. Avery sat quietly sketching, while the attendees discussed art and read poetry, and black cocker spaniel Picasso demonstrated his latest tricks.

Gradually Avery’s landscapes evolved beyond naturalistic representation: views were simplified and details omitted; planes were flattened, colours and shapes distorted. His work became more abstract.

Avery also painted intimate domestic scenes, again in a colour-rich, minimalist style. March sits in quiet reflection, her chestnut hair wrapped in a neat babushka, her face delicately etched, her torso distilled into a plum-coloured flat form. A husband and wife relax at home, she in a cornflower blue dress, arms folded, he in a brown suit and cobalt bow tie, puffing on his pipe. 

'I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea.’

Avery participated in a number of small group exhibitions, and a few of his paintings were purchased by major museums and collectors. But for the most part he was under the radar. It was not until 1952, when he was 67, that he received his first full-scale retrospective. 

As he grew older Avery’s art continued its journey towards abstraction. He thinned his pigments and painted blocks of colour on the canvas in closely related tones. And yet his work always retained some connection to the original inspiration.

Boathouse by the Sea, 1959
Oil on canvas. 182.9 x 152.4 cm, 72 x 60 in © [2022] The Milton Avery Trust. Courtesy Victoria Miro

Two cream-sailed yachts trace their way through a flamingo-pink sea. A view of a boathouse is reduced to horizontal planes of black, yellow, turquoise and orange. Amber and lemon beach blankets sit alone on peach sand beneath a butterscotch sky. 

Avery’s colours express an intense sense of time and place. 

‘I eliminate and simplify, leaving apparently nothing but color and pattern.'

Avery died in 1965 following a long illness, and, appropriately, he was buried in the Artists Cemetery in Woodstock, New York. The painters that had so enjoyed his hospitality were forever grateful for his encouragement.

'Avery is first a great poet. His is the poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty.’ Mark Rothko tribute to Milton Avery, 1965

Avery was driven by a love of art, of nature and of colour. He wasn’t looking for attention or recognition. He teaches us that a creative life requires total dedication, an independent spirit, a generous heart and an endlessly curious mind.

'Art is like turning corners, one never knows what is around the corner until one has made the turn.’

'The corner, where struggle and greed fight.
We write songs about wrong ‘cause it’s hard to see right.
Look to the sky, hoping it will bleed light.
Reality's a bitch, and I heard that she bites
The corner.
The corner was our Rock of Gibraltar, our Stonehenge
Our Taj Mahal, our monument.
Our testimonial to freedom, to peace, and to love.
Down on the corner.’ 
Common, ‘The Corner’ (L Lynn/ K West/ A Oyewole/ U BHassan/ L Moore)

No. 388

‘Trying to Trap the Fact’: The Distorted Truth of Francis Bacon

Head VI

‘We are all animals if you care to think about it. It’s just that some people are more aware of the fact than others.’
Francis Bacon

I recently visited an excellent exhibition of the work of Francis Bacon. (‘Man and Beast’ is at the Royal Academy, London until 17 April.)

It was an unsettling experience.

Bacon painted crucified carcases, snarling Furies, beast-people caught in cuboid cages; dogs, chimpanzees and owls trapped and snared, howling and baying; bullfights, bestial heads and screaming Popes; writhing, twisting, tormented lovers; butchered meat, muscle and sinew, blood and bone. 

‘We are meat, we are potential carcases.’

Bacon’s work was all physical pain and mental anguish; violence and voyeurism. He wanted to convey to us that the veneer of civilisation is thin and fragile; that we are driven by carnal impulses; that we are essentially beasts. He revealed the animal within, caught between rage and fear, in tortured isolation. His aim, he said, was to ‘unlock the valves of feeling and return the onlooker to life more violently.’

Sometimes the horror in his paintings is brought home by the presence of the everyday: of flowers, umbrellas and hats; of chaises longues and tubular steel furniture. (Bacon spent a brief period in the late 1920s as an interior designer.) This is the banality of evil.

‘Most people live a kind of veiled life and tend to disguise what they are, what they want, what they really feel.’

Fragment of a Cucifixion

Bacon’s fascination with man’s animal nature and his dark vision of life were perhaps shaped by his upbringing in County Kildare, Ireland. Born in 1909, he was the son of a retired army officer who trained horses, had a violent temper and a taste for field sports. The young Bacon suffered from chronic asthma, a condition that was triggered and amplified by contact with animals. 

‘The whole horror of life, of one thing living off another.’

No doubt Bacon was also influenced by the slaughter of World War I; by the debauchery he saw in the clubs, bars and brothels of Berlin and Paris between the wars; by his time spent as an ARP warden during the Blitz, recovering bodies from London bomb sites; by consciousness of the Holocaust and the atom bomb; by his trips to the bush in southern Africa; by his adventures in the dark alleys of Soho.

‘I have looked at books of wild animals… because those images excite me and every so often one of them may come up to me and suggest some way to use the human body.’

Bacon was also inspired by his diverse interests. He was an enthusiast for art history, admiring Michelangelo, Velazquez, Rembrandt and Goya. He treasured Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering studies of animal motion. He read anatomical texts and medical manuals, magazines of wildlife photography and books on big game hunting and bullfighting. He had a passion for Egyptology and classical literature.

‘Reading translations of Aeschylus opens up the valves of sensation for me.’

Study of a Dog 1952

Bacon channelled all this stimulus into his work. For example, his repeated representations of a primal scream were informed by Poussin’s ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ and the terror-stricken shriek of the nursemaid in Eisenstein’s ‘Battleship Potemkin.’

‘I did hope one day to make the best painting of the human cry.’

I was particularly struck by the lateral leaps Bacon took from inspiration to execution. A 17th century Velasquez painting of Pope Innocent X, in all his pomp and power, becomes an expression of existential pain and panic. A barn owl in flight becomes a crucified figure. A diving pelican becomes a Fury. Two wrestlers become two lovers. 

There is a lesson for us all here. We should not expect inspiration to be literal and logical. Rather it catches us off guard, from out of left field. It creeps up on us where and when we least expect it. We often talk about creative leaps. Strategists must leap too.

At first Bacon’s work seems all contorted, twisted and warped. But then we realise that with all this distortion he is seeking to capture a brutal truth about sensation. What he is saying is crystal clear.

‘I think the very great artists were not trying to express themselves. They were trying to trap the fact.’

'I never thought that this day would ever come
When your words and your touch just struck me numb.
Oh and it's plain to see that it's dead.
The thing swims in blood and it's cold stoney dead.
It's so hard not to feel ashamed
Of the loving, living games we play
Each day.
The hardest walk you could ever take
Is the walk you take from A to B to C.’

The Jesus and Mary Chain, 'The Hardest Walk’ (J & W Reid)

No. 360

In Quiet Contemplation: ‘It Is in Silence that One Gets to Face Oneself’

Helene Schjerfbeck,Self-Portrait, Black Background, 1915

I recently attended an exhibition of the work of Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck (Royal Academy, London, until 27 October).

Schjerfbeck was born in Helsinki in 1862. Her father was an office manager in the state railways. When at the age of 4 she fell down the stairs and broke her hip, she was given drawing materials to cheer her up. It soon became clear that she had a special talent, and at 11 she was sent to study art in Helsinki. In 1880 she moved to Paris, and she subsequently spent time in artists’ colonies at Pont Aven, Brittany and St Ives, Cornwall. 

Schjerfbeck began as a realist, and over the years her work embraced impressionism and abstraction. She painted still lifes and landscapes, rural views and domestic scenes. Yet one is most struck by her portraits.

Schjerfbeck’s subjects regard us over their shoulders. Then they turn away and look down. Sometimes they simply close their eyes. Her friend Maria attends to her book with her back to us. Her black-clad mother reads, sews and sits silently with her hands clasped in front of her. The seamstress and the schoolgirl are lost in private reflection. 

Occasionally the melancholy mood is lifted by an element of fashion. Schjerfbeck subscribed to Marie Claire magazine and had an eye for a beret, a cloche hat, a bold shade of lipstick. 

From her early twenties until the end of her life, aged 83, Schjerfbeck painted raw, candid self-portraits. Hair neat, lips pursed, eyebrows arched. Angular features. A spot of rouge on her cheeks. The portraits become progressively more pared back, more abstract and anguished. Youth fades, skin pales, colours recede, shadows fall. Finally she faces death, gaunt and alone.

One leaves the Schjerfbeck exhibition haunted by a sense of sadness. She was an artist of introspection; of quiet rooms and muted colours; of silence and stillness.

When I was at college I recall a visit from my friend Catrin’s parents. I was babbling away, filling the awkward silence with inconsequential nonsense - as is my wont. At length Cat’s father addressed me in somewhat severe Welsh tones:

‘It is in silence that one gets to face oneself.’

These words stuck with me.

Helene Schjerfbeck,Maria (detail), 1909

I have generally subscribed to the view that an active mind needs constant stimulus; that it must process that stimulus into opinions and beliefs; that we must always be looking, listening and learning, deliberating, debating and discussing. But there’s a limit. As I’ve aged I’ve realised that it’s also important to stop and catch one’s breath; to liberate the brain from the trivial and unimportant; to pause and take stock. I have found it helpful when on the verge of sleep, on the edge of consciousness, to review the day and reflect on tomorrow. I guess I’ve gradually learned to appreciate absence and stillness.

‘Dreaming does not suit me. To work, to live through work, that is my path.’

Fate dealt Schjerfbeck a cruel hand. Her childhood accident left her with a lifelong limp and she suffered poor health. She was unlucky in love. Financially challenged, she spent many years nursing her mother in a small town north of Helsinki. She died in a sanatorium in Sweden in 1946. Nonetheless, one can’t help thinking that, though she had a tough life, she probably left it with profound knowledge and understanding, and with a strong sense of self. Perhaps that is enough.

Helene Schjerfbeck - The School Girl II (1908)

'Quiet nights of quiet stars, quiet chords from my guitar,
Floating on the silence that surrounds us.
Quiet thoughts and quiet dreams, quiet walks by quiet streams,
And the window that looks out on Corcovado. Oh how lovely.’

Astrud Gilberto, ‘Quiet Nights (Corcovado)’ (A C Jobim / G Lees)

No. 246

PsychoBarn: A Lesson in Disorientation

I came up from Green Park tube, walked along Piccadilly, past the Ritz, the Wolseley and the Caffè Concerto, and turned into the Royal Academy.

There, in the neo-classical courtyard of this august building, sat a red family house with slatted wooden walls, gothic ornamentation, a tatty white porch and a steep mansard roof.

It stopped me in my tracks.

'Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)’ is a piece by the British artist, Cornelia Parker (at the Royal Academy until March 2019). It was first shown on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2016.  It was built using materials reclaimed from a typical American red barn. They have been carefully dismantled, then re-assembled in the form of the Bates family mansion from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film ‘Psycho’. This in turn was itself a studio interpretation of an Edward Hopper painting, ‘House by the Railroad’ (1925). ‘PsychoBarn’ is smaller in scale than a normal house (just over 30 feet). And it is incomplete. At its rear it is supported by scaffolding, just like a stage-set.

The piece suggests a kind of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ romanticism, at the same time as concealed threat and inarticulate menace. Parker talks about confronting the 'polarities of good and evil'. It is a house built from a barn. It is not whole. It deceives. Its scale confuses. In an urban context its architecture disorientates. And being modeled on a film, which in turn was inspired by a painting, it carries layered meaning.

Parker borrowed the term 'transitional object' from developmental psychology. It was coined in 1951 by the analyst DW Winnicott to describe an item used to provide psychological comfort as a substitute for reality - typically a child’s comfort blanket or teddy bear.

‘PsychoBarn’ is like a comfort blanket in that it is real and unreal. It is initially attractive, simple, reassuring. But on closer inspection it is deceitful, ambiguous, complex.

‘I like the idea that you take things that perhaps seem clichéd. But they’re clichéd for a reason. They resonate with a huge amount of people…The inverse of the cliché is the most unknown place.’

Cornelia Parker

There’s a simple lesson that we could all learn here.

So often modern communication reflects and confirms the world as it is, or as we would want it to be. Our ideas are two-dimensional, flat and transparent. We pedal clichés rather than subverting them; reinforce stereotypes rather than challenging them. Consumption becomes easy, passive and comfortable. And at the same time bland, safe and forgettable.

If we really want to be remembered, we should endeavour to disorientate our viewers; to disarm and disturb them. We should consider changing the context, adjusting the scale, reconfiguring the materials, juxtaposing the incongruous, layering the meaning, subverting the message.

In the midst of the comforting and familiar, we should seek out ‘the most unknown place.’

Time for a festive break.
Next post will be on Thursday 3 January.
Have a restful Christmas.
See you on the other side, I hope.

'Christmas is here.
I know what I want this year.
Presents and toys are fine.
But I got bigger things in mind.
Santa can you swing more love? More peace?
Because that’s what everybody needs.’

Macy Gray, ’All I Want for Christmas'

No. 211

NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND 14

Garden and Woodland Special

Learning from Lilies: Strip Away the Context

I recently attended Painting the Modern Garden, an excellent exhibition examining the garden in art between the 1860s and 1920s. (It runs at the Royal Academy in London until 20 April.)

In the late nineteenth century there was a horticultural revolution. Bourgeois Europeans and middle class Americans had affluence and leisure time, and a yearning to preserve something natural against the march of industrialisation. Gardening became an obsession. They studied, imported, cultivated and collected. One contemporary writer proclaimed, ‘I love compost like one loves a woman.’

Artists seem to have been in the front ranks of this revolution. Gardens provided a subject to express their thoughts about nature, beauty, colour and light. Gardens could suggest interior as well as exterior truths. Pissaro, Renoir and Bonnard; Sargent, Van Gogh and Matisse. The great painters of the day repeatedly set their easels up outside, in the garden.

Painting the Modern Garden is an exhibition of intoxicating colour: radiant, ravishing yellows, pinks and purples; intense sensory explosions. One feels the heat and languor of a long Summer’s afternoon. White linen, lace and crinolines. Let’s play croquet on the lawn, take tea on the terrace, reel around the fountain. Sunflowers, dahlias, peonies and poppies. Come consider the chrysanthemums, tend the rhododendrons with me.

And then, of course, there was Monet and his wondrous water-lilies.

At Giverney Monet painted water-lilies over and over again. He studied them, scrutinized them, isolated them in their stillness, floating in the reflective water and changing light. He removed them from their context. They became abstract contemplations of colour, tone, atmosphere and silence.

One critic observed: ‘No more earth, no more sky, no limits now.’

I was struck by this comment and found myself thinking about the role of context in brand marketing and communication.

Context is central to good marketing. If we can understand a brand’s place in the world, we can promote its relevance more effectively. And the broader the cultural context considered, the deeper the understanding. But whilst context is critical to comprehension, effective communication requires compression, distillation and focus. So ultimately we must strip context away.

Too often we fail in this respect. We try to cram our messaging with visual, verbal and conceptual cues. Show the user, signal the occasion, reference the tradition, give the reason-to-believe, bash out the benefit. Communication becomes loud, cluttered, busy and bewildering. Context can be constricting.

Imagine if you could express your brand as an abstract truth, not an observed reality; an intense distillation, not an actual depiction. Imagine if you could strip away the context, narrow the frame, focus on the essence itself.

What would you say? What would we see? How would we feel?

Why We Go on Awaydays: A Reminder from Shakespeare

‘Good servant, tell this youth what ‘tis to love…
It is to be all made of sighs and tears.
It is to be all made of faith and service.
It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion and all made of wishes,
All adoration, duty and observance.
All humbleness, all patience and impatience.
All purity, all trial, all observance.’

As You Like It, V, ii

Last week I saw a marvellous production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It at the National Theatre in London (running until 29 February).

As the programme notes point out, As You Like It is a ‘green world’ comedy. Its characters escape the oppressive regime of the city for the Forest of Arden. They’re leaving behind convention, hierarchies and the pressure of the present. In the forest they can be more contemplative, philosophical, romantic. They can express themselves freely; they can imagine possibilities; they can explore new roles and identities. They undergo transformations, revelations.

In recent years we’ve perhaps become a little sceptical about Awaydays. The heart sinks at the awkwardness of seeing our senior staff in their weekend casuals. We shun the flip-charts and Post-Its, gummy bears and energiser drinks; the bumptious facilitator and the embarrassing ice-breakers. We balk at the expense in time and money. And so generally we end up just taking a couple of hours in a conference room over at the Media Agency. The future can wait…

But I’m inclined to say that genuine Awaydays justify the cost. Increasingly we have our heads down, dealing with today’s pressing challenges; we rarely look up to talk about tomorrow’s. Awaydays provide an opportunity to draw a line in the sand, to consider broader themes and more distant horizons, to dream new possibilities and imagine the unthought.

And Awaydays do indeed gain something from being away.

‘There’s no clock in the forest.’

Orlando, As You Like It

‘Let’s Play Crusaders’: The Price of Difference

Martin and I shared a bedroom overlooking the back gardens of Heath Park Road. In the summer you could see all the other kids in the street - the Richards, the Chergwins et al - playing Cowboys and Indians in their own little domains. 

‘Let’s play Crusaders,’ we determined. (The ‘70s were more innocent times, somewhat lacking a proper historical context…)

Mum made us white smocks from old sheets and we imprinted bold crimson crosses on their fronts. We completed the outfits with blue balaclava helmets and woollen tights borrowed from our younger sisters. 

And as we skipped around the garden, taking on Saladin and his scimitared hordes, it struck me that it’s not easy being different.

‘We are stardust.
We are golden.
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden’

Joni Mitchell/ Woodstock

No. 68