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• The Plains

• Maynard Dixon

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• 1931-1933
  Oil on canvas
  26 x 30 1/8 inches
  Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, UT, United States.
  
  
  
  “Give me the plains, — the barren and sun-beaten plains!
  Free in the vague indeterminate murmur of winds,
  High on the arched and tremendous back of the world,
  Alone and close up under the skies,
  Let me lie dark in the grass like an Indian,
  Hearing loud footfalls afar in the rumbling sod,
  And know that it knows me! — Up from the grass to the sky,
  From the skies again back to the grass — I go to the plains!
  
  Give me the plains — the lonely and rain-beaten plains!
  There no escape, nor to hide from the all-seeing heavens, —
  There no evasion, — open and wide and above;
  No thought-guiding trails, — high up and flat under Heaven;
  Free with fierce winds to follow the flicker of lightnings, —
  Free with the soft-rustling rains that govern the grasses, —
  Free with the long sandy rivers — I go to the plains!
  
  Give me the plains — the solemn and sun-hallowed plains!
  There the outcroppings of curious rock where the coulee
  Breaks to the far-fading slant of the shallow-cut valley;
  Away by the distant diminutive cottonwood groves
  Run the wild-roaming bands of mustangs, their changeable colors
  Passing in white-whirling dust — I go to the plains!
  
  Give me the plains — the ancient mysterious plains!
  Low to the grass-tufted world wheels the black-pinioned buzzard,
  Skimming his shadow over endless undulations of prairie;
  (So passes my soul's own shadow over the plains that it longs for!)
  Dim in the grass leads the shadowy track of the Blackfeet;
  Far are their camps, — they are lost along the blue wave of the mountains;
  Dim are their smokes, receding, fading, a phantom, a ghost-song;
  Memory-smokes, receding, dissolving over the prairies, —
  Trail of my own lost footprints — I go to the plains!”
  
  —Maynard Dixon, “The Plains”
  
  As noted by art historian Linda Gibbs, in this painting of the endless Western plains, “the expanse is the subject.” There is no wagon, no horse, no car—only a dirt road, Dixon’s signature clouds, and emptiness. For some, like those fleeing the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, this painting of the Western plains may have suggested endless possibilities. Others, however, may see it as an image of a coming storm. Please see Dixon’s 1938 painting Roadside, where a lonely figure appears on the side of a similar road. For this figure, the endless possibilities seem to have disappeared. (Branding the American West)
  
  In the summer of 1900, Maynard Dixon journeyed into the Southwest from his native California, traveling “Eastward to see the West.” It was the first of many trips he would make during his lifetime to sketch and paint in the often remote western regions of the country. In the dramatic scenery and profound silences of what he called “my western world,” Dixon found what he referred to on numerous occasions as “the Real Thing.” (Excerpt taken from Escape to Reality: The Western World of Maynard Dixon)
  
  Dixon had very specific ideas about the ideological components of the West. His landscapes such as “The Plains,” with its broad horizons and wide open spaces, perpetuated into the 20th century the notion of the West as a national symbol of limitless opportunity and freedom.

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Other paintings by Maynard Dixon:

Virginia City

Land Westward

Peaceful Morning (American Southwest)

Elements of Nevada