Oxcart - Blue Sea

Combining elements from folk art and European modernism, Avery is famous for his rural landscapes and seascapes featuring isolated individuals. He studied art at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford, while working the night shift in a factory. At age forty, Avery moved to New York. There he encountered the work of Henri Matisse and the pre-Cubist works of Pablo Picasso, which transformed his approach to art. While his wife, Sally Michel, supported the family working as a freelance illustrator, Avery devoted himself solely to painting, developing a simplified visual language built around essential forms. During the late 1930s, their home became a meeting place for a group of young artists that included Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolph Gottlieb. "Oxcart-Blue Sea" is typical of Avery's mature style, as flattened areas of color define the painting's composition. The curve of the green hill echoes the curve of the purplish gray shore, creating a harmony that reveals Avery's debt to Matisse. Two oxcarts make their way along the shore, the individual riders isolated from the town seen in the distance. Quiet and humble, Avery himself was a loner, and while he would influence many abstract artists during the 1950s, he would neither become part of a group movement nor break from the representation of his fundamental subjects: landscape, seascape, still life, and the figure.