- Even before he made his first visit to the American West, east of his native California, Maynard Dixon early settled on the subject matter that would constitute his life's work: at 16, he sent some of his drawings to the renowned Western artist Frederic Remington, who thought the younger artist showed promise. After spending only a few months training formally at an art institute, Maynard struck out on his own, producing illustrations that proved popular with magazines. After a move to New York he began to question the vision of the West his own art presented, and determined that it was false and tired. A return to California marked a turn in his production with images of what he considered the true West. It is for these images that he is best known: oil paintings of the vast expanses of sky and land in the western states.
- From 1893 to 1906, Maynard Dixon was part of the young artistic community of San Francisco, creating illustrations that became increasingly adept with practice. He traveled into the West for the first time in 1900. The years in New York, 1907 to 1912, earned him a national reputation, and for a time he was the preeminent illustrator of Western stories. After 1912, back in the West, he produced images less heavily weighted with nostalgic Western cliches, and by 1921 he was able to reduce his commercial output and concentrate on painting. From the 1920s until his death in 1946, he maintained bases in different Western towns while making forays into the country to create his vivid depictions of the land.
- What some call Maynard Dixon Country comprises the lands of the American West, primarily Utah and Arizona. It was in these two states that Dixon lived the longest, settling in Arizona finally because the dry atmosphere was most beneficial to his health. He traveled widely throughout the West, however, and this is reflected in his work. The mountains of California, Dixon's home base during an early period of his career, make some appearances in his work. On two occasions, in 1909 and 1917, Dixon visited Montana where he depicted the Northern Plains Indians for whom he felt an affinity. During the 5-month period that Dixon lived in Taos, New Mexico with his second wife, the photographer Dorothea Lange, he produced many works.
- While most Maynard Dixon paintings express crisp distinctions of light and dark through broad passages of color, Dixon employed various styles as his career progressed. He began with intense colors thickly applied; by the final years of his career, his application of paint was thinner, his colors more nuanced and muted. The works of the late 1920s reveal the influence of Post-Impressionism and, to some degree, Cubism. Dixon dropped these inflections by the 1930s, seeking instead an expression of the West that conveyed its breadth and beauty in a more straightforwardly descriptive manner. His late works confidently build land and sky with big, strong, unhesitating brush strokes. The effect is monumental. Dixon responded to the Great Depression by producing a series of paintings of workers, but soon returned to his usual themes.
- Maynard Dixon paintings are modernist readings of a classic American theme. Their bright openness presents a flawless, perfectly ordered, essentially borderless place, free of the discord of modern life, and for many, Maynard Dixon paintings continue to encapsulate the American West. His images have since his death never ceased to be popular, and their popularity has helped to shape people's ideas about the region. Maynard Dixon's work celebrates an idealized West, free of strife, full of sky, that occupies an important part of the American consciousness.
