Three Birds 1952

This is Milton Avery's ‘Three Birds,’ a print in blue and black. Look how the layers overlap, creating depth. It’s like Avery’s building up a world, one block at a time, letting the paper breathe through the image. I can imagine him in his studio, maybe listening to jazz, carving away at the block, thinking about Matisse, about simplified forms. He probably was trying to get at something essential about flight, about the feeling of being airborne. See that middle bird, how it’s just an outline? It’s almost disappearing, like a memory or a fleeting thought. There’s a conversation happening here between color, shape, and surface. Avery’s not just representing birds, he’s making a statement about what it means to make a picture, a print, to make an artwork. He’s showing how a few gestures can evoke so much. That’s what painters do for each other; we learn to see the world anew.