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Hatch - Mia Bergeron , 2026.

American, b. 1979   -    

Long shadows

Cranes on Snow-Covered Pine

Born in Altmar, New York, Milton Avery (1885-1965) was the youngest of four in a working-class family. After moving to Hartford in 1898, he left school at 16 to work in factories – assembling typewriters and machining – as his family faced economic strain following his father’s death in 1905.

To support relatives, Avery juggled daytime factory jobs and evening art classes. Between 1905‑1918, he studied lettered design, life drawing, and model-based courses at the Connecticut League of Art Students – setting a lifelong pattern of diligent, self-driven learning.

"Avery’s genius lies not in meticulous detail or bravura gesture, but in how he distills the world into the essence of mood and colour. His figures are often faceless, his lines barely there. But the compositions breathe.

Avery’s method of thinning oil paints to a near-watercolour consistency gave his canvases a luminous, floating quality.

Befriending Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman during the 1930s, Avery’s flat, glowing colours and simplified forms deeply impacted the next generation of Abstract Expressionists – many acknowledged him as a mentor figure.

Avery played with negative space, outline, and veils of colour in a way that prefigured the concerns of colour field painters like Rothko, who once called Avery “a great poet-inventor of the 20th century.”