Dixon's
1942 oil painting Shiprock Mesa captures the palette of the desert
Southwest.
(Image: Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, Ariz.,
and Santa Fe, N.M.)
Few artists managed to capture the desert Southwest better than
Maynard Dixon. His mentor may have been journalist Charles Lummis, who
encouraged the California-born artist to "travel east to see the real
West," but Western artist Frederic Remington pushed Dixon in the right
direction.
Born on a ranch near Fresno on January 24, 1875, Dixon was an
asthmatic child who found only enough energy to draw. In 1891, at 16, he
sent two sketchbooks to Remington, who wrote back: "You draw better at
your age than I did at the same age. If you have the 'sand' to overcome
difficulties, you could be an artist in time. No one's opinion of what
you can do is of any consequence—time and your character will develop
that."
Two years later Dixon was studying at the
California School of Design
in San Francisco but left after only three months, preferring to work
in the open air rather than in a stuffy studio. By 1895 he was
illustrating for
The Morning Call. In 1900, following Lummis'
advice, he made the first of many trips to see the West—traveling east. A
decade earlier Lummis himself had walked from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Los
Angeles to take a job at the
Los Angeles Times, documenting his adventures in his book
A Tramp Across the Continent.
Dixon spent long stretches taking in much of the West. But his heart
and soul belonged to Arizona, and though he moved briefly to New York
City, he eventually made Tucson home.
"Dixon took his reputation very seriously and strove to always be
accurate in his details, his compositions and his color choices," says
producer-director Jayne McKay, whose documentary Maynard Dixon: Art and
Spirit won a 2008 Spur Award from
Western Writers of America.
"He chose to trek out to some pretty uncomfortable places in monsoon
season to find the clouds and contrast he thought best represented the
West as he understood it. He didn't fake it. He lived with the Indians
and he slept under the stars. He really saw himself as a cowboy when he
was in the West. Back in his San Francisco studio he liked to dress
flamboyantly and was quite a popular figure. Maynard Dixon had close
friendships with many artists—Carl Russell, Ed Borein, Xavier Martinez
and Ansel Adams—close friends who loved his ribald humor and enjoyed his
company on painting trips and other adventures."
Dixon was elected to the New York–based
Society of Illustrators
in 1911 and took a bronze medal at the Panama Pacific International
Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. He painted colorful murals for the
Southern Pacific Railroad and the
Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix.
"His compositions are so instantly recognizable and bold and
original," McKay says. "There isn't another artist who comes close,
though many have tried."
His last mural was of the Grand Canyon for the Los Angeles ticket
office of the Santa Fe Railroad. The mural was installed on November 8,
1946. Days later Dixon died of a heart attack in Tucson.
"Maynard Dixon achieved something very significant in that he painted
the deserts as arid and hot and realistically desolate as they really
are," McKay says. "He saw the beauty in the cloud shadows and the
relationships between the sagebrush, the cactus and the hills, and he
painted those relationships. The other painters weren't doing that. They
were embellishing and enriching their canvases to make the land look
more appealing. Dixon's background as an accomplished illustrator gave
him the ability to paint the people of the West with this same
incredible eye for detail and accuracy. I truly believe that Dixon's
work is a visual historical record of our beautiful country."
Perhaps Los Angeles art critic Arthur Millier best summed up Dixon's
contributions: "Where many have looked, he is one of the few who have
really seen. His vision of the West is so true, we have come to see the
region through the forms and colors of his paintings. Thus, great
artists teach us to see nature."
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Maynard Dixon - Art of the West. By Johnny D. Boggs. Originally published by Wild West magazine. Published Online: October 02, 2012
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