Maynard Dixon

MAYNARD DIXON, one of the great painters produced in the west, was born in California, first came to Arizona in 1900 and has been coming back regularly since. Having spent all but five of his sixty-six years in western America, few artists know the country as he does. He spends his summers at Mt. Carmel, Utah, his winters at his studio on Prince Road in Tucson. No artist could live in more beautiful surroundings.He first came to Arizona in 1900. A Californian, he had then to travel Eastward to see the West; and though he had seen cowboys and Indians at home, they were all unlike the Mojave, Pima, Navajo and Apache he met in Arizona. Some of the sketches he made on that first visit are still in his portfolios and are treasured beyond price.

In two years he was back again for another ramble into the Hopi and Navajo countries, to see the Snake Dance and the Yei-Beitchai, when paleface visitors were few: three thousand Navajo at that dance and but a dozen whites. And into fabulous Canyon de Chelly, with its mysteries of sun and shadow and silent cliff ruins, which made an impression on him more vivid and lasting than any place he has seen from Canada to Central Mexico.

For all his knowledge of the Southwest and its people Dixon is not so much a painter of persons and places as he is of types and regions. Although you could journey from Montana to Mexico by looking through his notes and sketches always accurate you would find most of his mature paintings are not enlargements of these but the results, the summation of things seen, experienced or perceived, that to him is the inner reality of his subject. And his types are as true as his landscapes not only in features and costume but in use and habit. The greatest compliment he was ever paid, he says, was in 1907 by a Tucson native who looked him over and said, "Well, you've been here twenty-four hours, and look like you were born here."

If you ask him where he studied art, he will say: "Well, I'd just go and look at it and paint it the best I knew how and then maybe have the picture hung right along side of some feller's work that made it look like the dust of all-get-out. That's what takes the nonsense out of you." Experience and the little patch of land that lies between the Rockies and the Pacific have been his professor and his art school.

He has exhibited in many places in the East,and he has a long list of mural paintings to his credit. His first, four lunettes for the Southern Pacific depot in Tucson, were installed August, 1907. Though dark with smoke, they are still doing duty. Another, one of his best, is a large panel in the dining room of the Arizona Biltmore at Phoenix. It shows plainly the influence of Indian design and color upon his work. Outstanding among others are a wall in California State Library at Sacramento; Mark Hopkins Hotel and Kit Carson Cafe in San Francisco; two lunettes for S. S. Silver State; one in P. O. at Martinez, Calif.; two walls in the new Dept. of Interior Bldg. in Washington; a wall in Fremont High School in Los Angeles; and at this writing, he is finishing one called "Palomino Ponies-1840" a bunch of Palominos being chased by a pregringo Vaquero for the Post Office at Canoga Park, Californiawhich brings us up to date. As to ultra modernism, he says: "It's supposed to be a free country. Every man has a right to go to hell in his own way. But this trying to make art a ruatter of fashion is putting it on a level with millinery. What we need in painting, same as in business and politics, is less smartness and uore plain honesty. And all this bunk about some Eastern painters liscovering America a lot of us never had to discover it, we've been in it and of it and for it all our lives." R. C.