Journalist Charles Lummis advised California-based Maynard Dixon that he must ‘travel east to see the real West’. My journey began further east, in London, England, then west to homes in Texas and SW Colorado.

The journey to find my truth in the West meant exploring the dialogue between myth and reality. Like Dixon, who feared how his illustrative work romanticized the West, I struggled with the plethora of paintings that depicted what people thought ‘The West’ should look like or what it used to look like. I saw a different truth, a different beauty. So, like Dixon, I headed outdoors to immerse myself in direct observation, to discover the authentic spirit of the place, what Dixon called ‘The Real Thing’.

The Big Bend region in west Texas was my first experience of the desert, and I found a spiritual home there. The Big Bend became my escape to reality, my refuge from city life. It’s a startling place - the acute silence, the scale, and the extraordinary range and complexity of the geology, from volcanic molten mountains, tectonic uplifts, to eroded oceanic strata.

Dixon helped me understand the desert’s geological forms and quality of light. He has claimed our visual imagination of the desert: light, heat, scale, geometric weather-worn shapes, and expansive time. Dixon embraced depicting geological complexity and in certain works – favorites of mine, such as ‘Volcanic Cones’ and ‘Fortification Butte’ - he made it the central motif. I wanted to echo that sentiment in my painting, ‘Big Bend Geology’.

Though I have explored Dixon’s Utah and Arizona, for me, meaningful work comes from land that I have an ongoing dialogue with. The Four Corners, close to my home, is a diverse landscape that includes mountains, high desert plains, juniper and pinyon pine-clad mesas (technically Mesa Verde is a cuesta), ancient dwellings, vistas of scattered uplifts, valleys and canyons containing groves of spectacular cottonwoods.

Dixon’s poignant depictions of lonesome cottonwood trees inspired my second piece in the show, ‘Canyon Cottonwood’, sourced from McElmo Canyon to the west of Cortez. Dixon knew that the inclusion or focus upon an isolated tree or homestead said so much about the essence of a place and our existence within it.

With the foundation that mural and illustrational work provided, Dixon was an impeccable technical designer. Both of my paintings combine the use of gridding with selected principles from dynamic symmetry to establish strong vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. This helped contain the Big Bend mountain peaks, manage the butte angles, and place the triangular dynamic of the cottonwood tree.

Dixon was a contemporary of some of my favorite artists in Britain, Paul Nash, David Bomberg, Walter Sickert, C.R.W. Nevinson, and Francis Cadell. The period between the two world wars and the evolvement of modernism produced incredible landscape art. Not all artists embraced the implications of modernism, but they, including Dixon, were inspired and influenced by the language created by movements such as, fauvism, surrealism, and cubism. It expanded their ‘vocabulary’. They now had a variety of languages through which they could make bold expressive personal statements. Dixon was a master of simplification and amplification. His paintings had purpose, with a motif clearly defined. Yet the methods and techniques he adopted were subservient to the statement. He struck the right balance between seeking the truth and representing that authenticity while incorporating personal artistic expression.