March Avery: A Life in Color is the first monograph on the New York-based painter March Avery. Documenting the artist’s practice of more than 80 years, the book features three newly commissioned texts and some 200 images.
Avery was born in 1932 to the painters Milton Avery and Sally Michel, and began painting as a child. As she says, “I think I was painting in utero.” The dividing line between life and art was blurred during her upbringing, as is reflected in the subject matter of her work: everyday domestic scenes, portraits of friends and family members, and landscapes visited and revisited over the course of a lifetime.
Avery’s oil paintings, sketches and watercolors are known for their flat picture planes, interlocking shapes and simplicity of forms. The artist’s mastery of colour brings life, immediacy of place and emotional depth to her compositions, as March Avery: A Life in Color illustrates, beautifully.
The book also includes articles by writers/critics Johanna Fateman, Lynne Tillman and John Yau, whose texts explore and animate Avery’s life and work.
