evolved into paintings with more information.
After enjoying playing with color and form
without the restrictions of minimalism I found
Maynard’s work in a 1945 Arizona Highways.
I realized my new-found vision was not all my
own and felt a need to go my separate way,”
Mell says. “I still, to this day, feel at times my
work crisscrosses over his territory somewhere
between my version of realism and abstraction
and I get a certain comfort out of that.”
Dixon died in 1946, long before Mell was
painting the West, but he did get to interact
with Hamlin, his last wife, in the 1980s. “There
was a Dixon show in town and she had heard
I took helicopter rides with NBC helicopter
pilot Jerry Foster, so I arranged for her and John,
Maynard’s son with Dorothea Lange, to go up
with us. She, obviously, was a painter too, so
we had lots to talk about, including Maynard,”
Mell says. “At one point we landed on a beach
on the Salt River, and she got out and talked
about all she had learned from him and how
they would go to Utah to paint together. It was
a fun trip, and later she gave Jerry and I Dixon
drawings as a thank you. Mine was on the back
of a big Dorothea Lange business card.”
Elliott, who will also be showing landscape
works in the Tucson show, has used Dixon as a
point of reference for many of his ideas about
art. “In 1917 Maynard Dixon wrote about
Glacier National Park: ‘I did not think too much
of the mountains...’ I was a bit disappointed
when I read this. How could an artist I admired
and respected say such a thing about a place
that resonates so deeply with me? While on a
trail, following in his footsteps trying to find a
mountain he had painted in Glacier it hit me—
he is a man of the desert,” Elliott says. “On his
trip to Glacier in 1917 he painted Red Eagle
Mountain from Red Eagle Lake, 101 years later
I hiked the eight miles to the lake to find
his vantage point and to paint a study of the
mountain myself. In 2006 a fire burned much
of the forest leading to the lake, but when
Maynard was there it would have been a dense
forest, which I can see would be claustrophobic
to someone used to wide and distant vistas
of the desert southwest and it may have
influenced how he saw the mountains. Even
with that revelation, I wondered how he could
not fall in love with the mountains of Glacier
with their jewel-like colors and their dynamic
and elegant shapes, something Dixon sought
out and captured so well. With that thought,
I came to realize that all great artists have their
own favorite subjects and that is what defines
their vision and Dixon was a visionary and
definitely his own man. He has inspired me to
follow my vision and showed me that the West
is romantic enough as is and does not need toLen Chmiel, Enormity, oil on canvas, 27 x 23”
G. Russell Case, Be Still and Know, oil on canvas board, 35 x 42”