Sean Cavanaugh continues to extend the Avery family’s artistic legacy in Woodstock, which includes the art of his grandfather and grandmother Milton and Sally Michel Avery, his mother and father March Avery Cavanaugh and Philip A. Cavanaugh, and daughter Delilah Cavanaugh. The art that the family has created in the Woodstock area is the subject of the exhibition “Going Upstate: The Avery Family in Woodstock”, on view at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts in Woodstock from July 11-October 27th.
Growing up, Cavanaugh was continually exposed to the art of his family, and to lessons about art, devotion, and honing the craft. He often took the bus alone to Woodstock and stayed with his grandmother. They spent a lot of time together, and Sean would hike around. Sean recalls that his father always seemed to have a camera hanging around his neck, and he continues to be astonished that his mother painted nearly every day for sixty-five years. He also admires her courage as a colorist. He believes Sally proved to March that it was “possible to be a woman who paints; to have a baby and continue painting [and] that it was normal to work around people, to find inspiration as an artist in the small cast of characters and the goings-on at home.” On occasion, Sean follows the family’s example; his watercolor Spite & Malice pictures his wife Constance (a native of central California, whom Sean met at college), sitting with a friend at the family pool in Bearsville. The work dates from the late 1990s, when Sean and Constance often weekended upstate with friends.
Sean recognizes how important his grandparents’ and parents’ summers away from New York City over the course of their lives together were to their development as artists. “The freedom of those summers out of the city was very important for my grandparents and my mother too. My parents continued that [tradition] because my father was teaching English, so he had the whole summer off, and we’d go away for a month or more. It was a time to see something different, go on tour for a little bit. You gain all this new material, these new images, and once you’re home you can mine it all.”
Sean attended the Friends Seminary; a Quaker school located in lower Manhattan. Growing up, he fought against the idea of becoming a painter. He initially thought that he “would do something else. That something was never powerful enough to compete with making art.” He initially connected mostly with his grandfather’s early work and pencil sketches, and his appreciation grew out of his admiration for his grandfather’s ability to render figures, landscapes, and architecture in a realistic manner.
Sean attended Pitzer College in Claremont, California, from 1987 to 1991, majoring in art and environmental studies. He also took graduate-level courses in environmental theology. While at college he created landscapes, desert studies, and still life’s, working primarily in watercolor and gouache. As a sophomore, he took a class in watercolor painting with James Fuller, who was especially encouraging. On a later visit to Woodstock, he showed his watercolors to his grandmother, who told him to paint more—that the twentieth watercolor would be better than the first. It was a credo practiced by Milton, Sally, and March. In comparison with others in his family, Cavanaugh is a slow and meticulous painter. He jokes sometimes that he should set an egg timer when he is working on a piece or use a medium that claims less time.
Sean’s courses in environmental studies furthered his interest in geology, educated him in the ways nature has been impacted by humans, and were a natural fit with his love for the outdoors. He carries on the Avery family’s passion for hiking. He often hiked with his parents and grandmother in the Woodstock area. Sally went along with them until she was nearly eighty, at which point she would sit and sketch while the others hiked. The museum director Thomas J. Loughman has noted that Sean’s works are “pervaded by an environmental consciousness and interrelated affinity with geology.”
After returning home from college, Sean joined his mother at her weekly life drawing sessions held in the studio of an old friend. At one point she began asking Sean to help critique her works in progress, as she “trusted that I understood her method and where she was trying to get to.” Occasionally, Sean attended life drawing sessions with his grandmother at the Woodstock Artists Association. In the summer of 2023, he took a silkscreen workshop at the Woodstock School of Art with Maggie Oakes. He enjoyed the fact that the medium forces your hand to react without hesitating and that he created two prints in four days.
Sean loves the work of the landscape painters of the Hudson River School, especially their small oil studies in nature. He shares with them a predilection for close inspection that sometimes verges on the transcendental. He explains that his “fascination with natural forms emerged early in my artistic life, when I was taken with rendering the sky as a landscape. I was influenced by a painting professor who one day declared that we would go outside and paint watercolors of clouds. Great clouds were rare in Southern California, and it made me appreciate their constant evolution—at times both solid and transparent, able to absorb and reflect light and the energy of the sky.”
In 2020, Sean’s work was shown in the context of the art of his family in “The Family Avery”, which also included the work of Milton, Sally, and March, exhibited at the Yares Gallery’s booth at The Art Show held in the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Art historian Kenneth E. Silver remarked that “Although the paintings of Sean Cavanaugh sometimes flirt with the photographic—so convincing is their illusionism—they are for all their variety—as abstract as the art of his forebears; his grandfather Milton Avery, grandmother Sally Michel, and mother March.” Before “Going Upstate”, Cavanaugh showed in Woodstock in 2015 in “Woodstock Summer Salon” at the Woodstock Framing Gallery, a group exhibition that also included Nancy Campbell, Statts Fasoldt, Richard Segalman, and other artists associated with the area. Sean’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami (2016-2017) and the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey (2024).
Cavanaugh keeps a work in progress on his easel in the city and at his studio in Bearsville. Like his mother March, Cavanaugh employs photographs as a memory aid. He photographs on his hikes, and the images serve as a reference to the truth of color and topography. Sean’s pictures range from the panoramic to the microscopic. He relies on the image as a source for rendering layers and layers of detail. As he nears completion, he abandons the photographic image and seeks to put shadows and density in balance.
In keeping with his family’s practice, Sean has frequently pictured Cooper Lake, hiking over from the family house, often bushwhacking in the woods above the lake, and trammeling along the ledges and among rocks and boulders. Cooper Lake was always a place the family went to visit when he was growing up, and he personally finds the spot to be “comically gorgeous.” He discovers a lot of good spots there to make photographic studies for potential pictures, and he feels that the surrounding mountains provide amazingly interesting shapes and tones. He remembers hiking one freezing winter day out of the family property along logging roads and finding his way to Cooper Lake Road, where he discovered a glimpse of the view he pictured in New Year, New Hope.
During COVID, Sean and his family spent most of their time in Bearsville. It was a very productive period for him artistically and a break from administrating the Milton Avery Trust and The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation. Spring Lace was one of the first pictures he created after moving upstate during the pandemic. Sean was inspired by the view close to his studio through pine branches toward Overlook Mountain and was absorbed in painting dark against light. He notes that the picture, though small, has a monumental quality, what his family would call “a big painting quality.” He often finds landscape subjects on or close to the family property. The View Returns pictures the same view as Spring Lace but from a slightly different approach and at a different season of the year.
Fall Phoenix is one of Sean’s largest canvases. The painting was inspired by a view close to the entrance to the family property and pictures a massive tree leaning toward a receding hillside. The artist’s palette normally is in the blue-green range, but in the spirit of his mother’s use of bright, bold colors, he tackled painting the spectacular golden-orange leaves, and the branches with their myriad patterns and glowing sunlit sky beyond. Short Days also features a view from the family property and is reminiscent of landscapes by Sally and March. At the time in the late 1990s, he had been painting in oil only a short time and went to his mother for technical advice. Jonet Portal features a view looking down on a puddle of water that is engulfed by fallen leaves. The artist discovered the spot while hiking on a street off Wittenberg Road. He embraced the challenge of capturing the subtle nuances of tone and rendering the reflections, shadows, and multiple patterns. November Stream was inspired by a hike one winter day near a frozen stream close to the Bearsville house of the artist Ralph Wickiser. Sean was attracted by the tone of the cold, bright water and of ice on ice.
In 2013, after years of painting traditional landscapes, Sean began to focus on isolated elements. He started to paint “rocks and boulders removed from their surroundings on [a canvas support as well as on] paper without providing any clues as to scale or environment. The solitary stone became a landscape unto itself, easily abstracted by the viewer’s own perspective. Zooming in on these ‘contained’ landscapes gave me a new appreciation of the infinite patterns and beauty hidden in the microcosms around us.” While working in the Catskills in 2013 he painted images of tree trunks and later decided to scan the landscape for interesting trunks to paint no matter where he happened to be, including the Far West or the Caribbean. The richly textured surfaces of these works include bark, lichens, and fungus. The trunks of trees had also piqued his grandfather Milton’s interest in such works as his Woodstock monotype In Edge of the Forest (1951, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), and is in tune with Sean Cavanaugh’s remarkable continuation of the Avery family’s legacy in Woodstock.
This article appears in July 2026.
