David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Milton Avery in Collinsville: The Power of Place

Celebrated American artist Milton Avery spent the summer of 1930 painting and sketching in the small Connecticut mill village of Collinsville, my hometown. His stay “turned Avery into the painter he would become,” observes Connecticut historian Gary Knoble. Up to that time, his paintings were “generally more ‘academic,’ while after Collinsville they became more ‘modern.’”  With this change, “his career as a painter really lifts off.”

The difference in colors, perspective and brushwork is easily seen when walking through “Milton Avery: The Connecticut Years,” an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum that includes the artist’s early work along with that of teachers and colleagues (image 1--all images credited below). If you can’t make it to the museum by October 17, 2021, the exhibition still lives between the pages of a beautifully illustrated catalog.

Deepest Summer (poem)

Possessing boundless and stifling tropical tenacity,
August rules with a slumbery and self-satisfied grip.
A season of glutinous greenery, of tangled brush,
choking vines and smothering leafy shade, it blusters
with thunder and lulls us with hazy skies and cloying
humidity that sets the skin aglow. Hypnotically
clicking crickets and dank, swampy fragrances of soil
and foliage leave us drunken in a private vegetable
lethargy.

Along roadsides, tired grasses grow raggedy,
and the heavy evening air is occasionally enlivened
with the whir of a few sentinel geese winging south.
Oak leaf edges curl brown. Maples flash
seductive patches of color. Fern clusters
are bronzed as if bitten by frost, and the luxuriant
fabric of summer begins to fade and fray,
slowly releasing its grasp and slipping away
unnoticed.