Pueblo Mountains, 1929
Oil on board
10 x 14 inches
Price Upon Request
For those who knew Maynard Dixon and his work there were often three things that constituted the “basic elements” of his pictures: form, color, and country. According to Arthur Millier, 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.” “He recreates the West,” Millier continued, “in terms of its own rhythms, its own forms, its own color, its own light.”[1] The painter LeConte Stewart also recognized these connections. Writing about his friend’s work, Stewart acknowledged Dixon’s superb draughtsmanship, but saw something more. “[I]f you can travel through the high desert country and not have memories of Dixon’s color and design come flooding in every turn, then either you don’t know his paintings, or your eyes have never trained to see the West.”[2]
Today, Dixon is primarily known for form: his depictions of the hard-edge patterns, rhythms, and shapes of the American West. He is seen more as a formalist than colorist. Indeed, one of the artist’s most important and enduring talents was his ability to depict the “bare-breasted and stark” landscapes of the region.[3] Yet, it is important to remember, as Millier and Stewart noted, that in Dixon’s best work form and color were essential in his representation of the western landscape. On closer inspection it is possible to see his bold use of color in pointillist azure skies, corral red and orange sandstone cliffs, purple and indigo shadows, and the golden yellow brilliance of autumnal cottonwoods.
Painted in 1929 in oppressive July heat somewhere in a “very little known country” between the Pueblo Mountains of southern Oregon and Alder Creek Ranch in northern Nevada, this work is emblematic of Dixon’s love of color – pure color.[4] In a majority of his paintings, it is clear that the Dixon loved the matted surface of woven canvas, which so beautifully replicates the granular quality of a desert landscape. Yet, in this remarkable painting it is possible to see the artist’s adroit handling of paint, employing and mixing a wide range of colors, from mauve foothills to a tangerine streak cutting across the middle ground, to represent the subtle beauty of this otherwise pedestrian Great Basin valley. Roughly ten years earlier, Dixon provided a remarkable parallel to this oil-sketch in his poem titled (appropriately) “Color:”
At evening as I walk the peaceful slopes,
With joy indrawing the swift-passing hues,
Tinting so tenderly the sunset hills
Veiled in the valley, deep in blue ravines,
I know that here at last I see revealed
The wonder-changing colors of the Soul.[5]
Few other works by the artist are as colorful, as painterly, or as bold. Indeed, this painting can be said to highlight the skills and eye of Maynard Dixon, Expressionist.
- Dr. James R. Swensen, Professor of Art History and the History of Photography, Brigham Young University.
[1] Arthur Millier, “Introduction,” in Maynard Dixon: Painter of the West (Tucson: Unknown, 1945), n.p.
[2] LeConte Stewart, “Maynard Dixon, Artist,” September 1945, LeConte Stewart Papers, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
[3] Maynard Dixon, “I am,” in Rim-Rock and Sage: The Collected Poems of Maynard Dixon (San Francisco: The California Historical Society, 1977), 123).
[4] Federal Writer’s Program (WPA), Nevada: A Guide to the Silver State (Portland, OR: Binfords & Mort), 212. See also Donald J. Hagerty, “Out There, Somewhere; Maynard Dixon and Nevada,” in Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada (New York: Rizzoli Electra and the Nevada Museum of Art, 2024), 238-241.
[5] Maynard Dixon, “Color” [1918] in Rim-Rock and Sage: The Collected Poems of Maynard Dixon (San Francisco: The California Historical Society, 1977), 81.
