Milton Avery, born in Sand Bar, New York in 1885, was an American modern painter who defied stylistic trends and charted his own way through American Modernism. He used color and abstracted forms to convey a unique vision of the American scene. His technique involved working with thin layers of paint that held to the subject matter of his Realist forefathers but pushed further into abstraction.
One of Avery’s notable works is Spring Orchard (1959), which is an oil-on-canvas painting measuring 50 x 66 1/4 inches (127.0 x 168.3 cm.). The painting can be found at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It is indicative of Avery’s purposefully nebulous depiction of reality.
Spring Orchard highlights a lush orchard landscape depicted through bold geometric shapes and a vibrant color palette consisting predominantly of blue and green hues for the trees while brown and red hues represent the earth. Avery masterfully utilized space within his compositions to create interest as seen here with robust tree limbs splitting up the piece into horizontal lines with defined negative space between them forming two distinct areas – sky & land.
