Golden October, Oct. 1940

Oil on board

16h x 20w inches

SOLD

 

1940 was the year Maynard Dixon and Edith Hamlin moved into their summer retreat in Mt. Carmel, Utah.  Plagued by emphysema, and acutely feeling the knocks of a difficult life, Dixon had entered a phase of reflective, poetic painting.  From it emerged some of the most soulful paintings of his career.  Just months earlier a reviewer of a recent exhbition had noted, "...this winter the veteran Dixon painted many small pictures.  These bring us the tang of desert air, the crisp-edges strong shadows, the delicate but pure tones of sunlifght on red, yellow and gray sand and rock, the long-flowing lines of the horizon, the stillness of the beautiful watelands, touched in with the deftness of a great draftsman-panter....Dixon is so steeped in desert forms and color that these little pictures appear to come from his brush like effortless lyrics.  He know his subject so well that it would be impossible for him to lie about it.  He is free to paint, if poetically." (Arthur Mill, The Art Thrill of the Week, Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1940.)

 

Dixon frequently painted cottonwood trees, which he admired as symbols of the hardiness needed to live in the desert, as well as their life-giving qualities.  Golden leaves indicate the coming of winter, perhaps echoing Dixon's own sense of mortality.  The present painting is a masterpiece of design, as the gulley that water created over time leads the eye into the composition, the center gives us a sense of calm embodied in the lone cow, and the far cliffs of of Diana's Throne in the distance suggest the coming of night, and perhaps, Dixon's (and our own) merging with the desert.

 

SIGNATURE

signed and dated lower left 

On reverse - numbered #639 and inscribed with title  Golden October 

This work is listed as #639 in Maynard Dixon's master paintings ledger.