Vermont Landscape 1943

Milton Avery made this pencil drawing, *Vermont Landscape,* probably en plein air, as they say. I love the idea of Avery rapidly capturing a sense of place in a humble sketchbook—the spiral binding sitting right there at the top of the page! It looks like he was working fast and intuitively, letting the drawing emerge through a process of mark-making and erasure, a kind of visual thinking out loud. The mountain sits in the background, a big soft gray presence. I can imagine Avery squinting, trying to capture its essence with just a few scribbled lines. The foreground is more gestural—the repeated marks suggesting the movement of trees and the contours of the landscape. I can almost see him, pencil in hand, responding to the light and shadow, the textures and rhythms of the scene. I'm sure Avery wasn't trying to copy the landscape. He was taking the raw data of the world and transforming it into something deeply personal. And in the process, he reminds us that drawing, like life, is a process of continual becoming.