MARCH AVERY

The daughter of artists Milton Avery and Sally Michel Avery, March Avery started painting at an early age; after more than six decades, she still spends nearly every day in her studio. Growing up amid some of the 20th century’s most celebrated painters—Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Marsden Hartley were among her parents’ friends—Avery always planned to become an artist herself, although she received no formal artistic training and instead studied philosophy at Barnard College. Her oil paintings and watercolors depict quiet domestic scenes, still lifes, country landscapes, and other poetic moments taken from everyday life. She reduces her subjects to their most essential elements of color and form, creating simple, flattened compositions that push even her figurative work toward abstraction. A masterful colorist, Avery harnesses her signature palette of rosy pink, dusty yellow, ochre, and cobalt to create striking contrasts.