Maynard Dixon: To the Desert Again

One hundred years ago, a solitary figure roamed the desert seeking to capture the endless sky and towering mesas in paint and poetry. Maynard Dixon's vision of the West was matchless. He survived the destruction of his city by earthquake and fire, the Great Depression and the civilizing of the West.

He spent over two decades sketching desert landscapes for western novels, and then decades more on a quest to find and portray it: the “real” west—the vast space, intense silence, and profound spirit of the land and people of the American Desert.