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The Navajo, 1914, 20 x 30 inches |
If you have ever felt the heat and stillness of a Southwest desert afternoon, watched clouds form in a sharp blue sky, or smelled the greasewood after a summer rain, you will know the truth of Maynard Dixon's vision. Although many painted the desert landscape, I believe no one was better at capturing the essence of the land and its people.
A great deal of excellent factual information has been written about Dixon, but his chronology does not concern me here. Rather, I will offer some personal observations and conclusions, gained over thirty years of studying his paintings and talking with hundreds of people familiar with Dixon's work. My perspective is more that of a painters than that of a historian.
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Silent Hour, 1931, 30 x 25 inches |
Perhaps Dixon would have been the last to admit it, but I feel that throughout his life he was searching for his personal grail, looking for the secrets and truths beneath the surface. He spent much of his adult life in the southwest desert lands seeking solitude, space, introspection, spiritual peace, and insight.
"I have absorbed…the wisdom of the ground," Dixon wrote. The act of painting, in its truest personal, non-commercial form, was his quest for personal truth.
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Navajo Land, 1925, 26 x 30 inches |
Many of his Indian paintings suggest that he was searching for the secrets he believed his subjects possessed. A few such paintings include: What an Indian Thinks, The Ancient, The Medicine Robe, The Wise Men, Mystic Stone, Men of the Red Earth, Silent Hour , and Earth Knower.
There is no single painting within the body of his work that better illustrates his view of the connection between the land and man than does Earth Knoweri, The figure, which in my opinion symbolizes humanity, comes from the earth, is the earth, and returns to the earth. The figure and the earth are one. The land will endure – it is immortality.
Composition, palette, application of paint, and surfaces in his paintings underwent many changes throughout his long career. Dixon's early palette, in The Navajo, 1914, is rather dark and moody when compared to later work, with a thick impasto surface. Navajo Land, 1925, painted ten years later, is brighter and more colorful.
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Low Country Cottonwood,
1940, 16 x 12 inches |
The surface is thinner, and in addition, he has allowed the gessoed, unpainted canvas to show through in places, creating an even lighter overall effect. In Silent Hour, 1931, Dixon balanced his palette rather evenly between light and dark, and by so doing dramatically emphasized the contrasts. This painting is also more monochromatic, perhaps a reflection of his mood at the time, as the depression was a very difficult time for Dixon, both emotionally as well as economically. Its surface is more richly painted than that of Navajo Land. The little painting Low Country Cottonwood, 1940 , is a deceptively simple composition of land, sky and light in crystal sharp colors, an excellent example of the reduction and
simplification of meaningless elements in Dixon's later work. The result is a modern, direct, and understated picture. Inyo Mountains, 1944, painted two years prior to his death, is reductive in the extreme – a truly modern, nearly cubistic painting of forms and shadows. In this composition the horizon line is high, leaving the majority of the format open to a study of geometric landscape forms. Lawrence Clark Powell, in From the Heartland, wrote about the later work: "Those last paintings were simplification and refinements of the elements by which man and other animals are dwarfed." Inyo Mountains is a strong example.
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Inyo Mountains, 1944, 16 x 20 inches |
At the end of his life, Dixon expressed his own feelings regarding the evolution of his work: "My work led to a more structural phase, in which colorshapes and space relations become the dominant factor; and this geometric element you may see in most of the later work."
I am often asked which period in his life's work I consider Dixon's strongest. My belief is that he did strong work over five decades, therefore, the answer must be purely subjective.
I hear people say, "Oh, there is a Maynard Dixon sky," or "That's a Dixon landscape if I ever saw one." Arthur Miller wrote, "His (Dixon's) vision of the West is so true that we have come to see the region through the forms and colors of his paintings. Thus great artists teach us to see."
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