Maynard Dixon, Inspiration, and reason #523* to go to Utah
Maynard Dixon. The Plains. 1931. 32 x 3 6. Maynard Dixon. 1926. Dry Gulch. 16 x 19. Maynard Dixon. Colorado Desert. 1927. 28 x 38. The landscapes that I'm working to capture - the rugged dry lands of eastern Washington - aren't easy. For every painting I'm willing to share with you, another one lands on the pile in the basement. Scrub, sage, stark eroded hills: these are not the elements of the Hudson River School of painters. But in Texas, studying with Deborah Paris, she and her husband Steve asked if I'd looked at the work of Maynard Dixon, as they thought that would provide me with paintings to study. Nope never heard of him. But clearly I needed to and now I have! Here's a few paintings and I've been turning to these again and again as I seek to resolve questions of composition, scale, color, foreground, depth and how to capture these crazy landscapes. *The paintings shown here are from Brigham Young University (they have a great online catalog here ) wher...