Arty Farty Friday ~ Maynard Dixon

I might not have become aware of
Maynard Dixon were it not for blog-buddy mike alerting me to a PBS American Masters programme featuring Dixon's second wife, famous photographer Dorothea Lange. My archived post on Ms Lange is HERE, by the way.

Maynard Dixon's paintings appealed to me, a lot, even from the much diluted medium of a computer screen - I'd love to find some of them in a gallery, in the "flesh".

What about the man, the painter then? What kind of man was he? Will his natal chart describe him "to a T" or hardly at all?

Maynard Dixon was born on 24 January 1875 in Fresno, California, into a fairly well-to-do family of Virginia Confederates who had moved to California after the American Civil War. His mother encouraged his gravitation to writing and drawing. He studied at the California School of Design, became part of the Bohemian Club. His first ventures to make a living from his talent involved illustration for newspapers, magazines and advertising materials. He wrote poetry too - a lesser known talent of his. There's a published volume of his poetry: Rim-Rock and Sage: The Collected Poems of Maynard Dixon (see here)

I Am (below) was written in 1936, between his second and third marriages:

Now I go out alone to ride the free hills,
bare-breasted and stark, these hills that make no concealment;
where no woman is with me,-no woman shall ever be;
where stern and alone I face the thing that I am;
where I face the void of all that I fail to be,
and knowing my fear, shall be not afraid of that fear.
Now I put out my hand, touching the sky of evening. . .
reaching, reaching between the stars, and it seems
there could be no time at which I did not exist
and no time ever at which I shall cease to be,-
while here alone in my manhood-self I am.

Chuckling. Why does this remind me of another Sun Aquarius type's writing? (Neil Diamond's song "I Am, I said")

He must have been something of "a character" - the early Bohemian influence stuck with him throughout his life. He always wore a big black Stetson hat, cowboy boots, bolo tie, carried a fancy cane and sometimes flaunted a cape. He must have rather enjoyed standing out in a crowd, whether in California, or the American south west. At heart, though, he seems to have been a solitary man.

In an article, Painterly Poet by Kevin Starr, one page of which is available HERE, Dixon is described thus:

"There was an aloofness, an essential reserve to his personality - an incipiently sardonic detachment if you will, masking the passionate, raging life within"

Another description of him by Donald J. Hagerty:

From the beginning Dixon was different: an authentic, iconoclastic, self-created individual. (HERE)

Of a book by the same D.J. Hagerty, The Art of Maynard Dixon:

An active and outspoken, sometimes a cantankerous, participant in the life of San Francisco and the West, painter Maynard Dixon (1875-1946) developed enduring themes: the majestic western landscape, the mysticism of the Native American, and (briefly, during the Great Depression) people caught in the grip of economic and social hardship.

On visits to New Mexico and Arizona Dixon found where his heart lay. He discovered his "muse" - the American south west.

Dixon married Dorothea Lange in 1920. Her iconic photographic style had an effect on his own painting style, and no doubt his painterly eye affected Lange's composition style too. It was a good match, even though he was some 20 years her senior. The couple had two sons. The marriage didn't last, however. Lange would be called away on commissions, Dixon would ride away to paint in solitude, into his beloved south west, not returning for many weeks. This wasn't a recipe for married bliss! They divorced in 1935. He married again in 1937, to Edith Hamlin, a fellow-artist, which marriage lasted until Dixon's death in 1947.

Before posting a few images of Dixon's paintings, a look at his natal chart - set for 12 noon as no time of birth is known. Moon and ascendant positions will not be accurate.

Earlier in the post there were a few brief quotes regarding Dixon's personality, as seen by biographers and others...again:
"There was an aloofness, an essential reserve to his personality - an incipiently sardonic detachment if you will, masking the passionate, raging life within"
"From the beginning Dixon was different: an authentic, iconoclastic, self-created individual."
"An active and outspoken, sometimes a cantankerous, participant in the life of San Francisco and the West..."

Anyone with basic astrological knowledge would recognise "aloof", "detachment" and "different" as keywords for the sign of Aquarius, where Maynard Dixon had Sun and two personal planets: Mercury and Saturn. I guess that Saturn added "sardonic" and "cantankerous! Jupiter and Mars in Scorpio might be seen as source of an inner passion and rage.

His natal Moon would have been in meticulous Virgo, whatever his time of birth. A Virgoan need for perfection could have been at root of his need to paint in solitude - just a guess.

There are a couple of very clear planet patterns in his chart configuration.
1. An harmonious Grand Trine in Fire signs linking Venus (art), Neptune(imagination, creativity) and Uranus (his Sun's ruler, the new and unusual). That fits well.

2. A Grand Square: Mars-Saturn-Pluto-Uranus - Here's more evidence of that reported sardonic and cantankerous side. I've noticed this type of configuration come up in the charts of political pundits and critics who are known for such traits.

Dixon's natal Venus is almost exactly conjunct my own, in Sagittarius. His paintings drew me in, at first sight - I adore New Mexico, properly titled "Land of Enchantment" too, and have, ever since my first visit there some 9 years ago.

There's a very good video, about an hour long, on Maynard Dixon's life and work: THE LINK

Examples of his paintings:

 Earth Knower, 1931/2

 Round Dance, 1931

 Forgotten Man, 1934

  Allegory by Maynard Dixon. Painted by the noted California artist between 1932 and 1935, it was donated by Marcia and Robin Williams of San Francisco. It is presently located in the office of the California State Librarian.(HERE) Interesting!

 Shapes of Fear, 1930

 Desert Storm

 No Place to Go, 1935

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Records of The Great Depression ~ Dorothea Lange

In the current financial climate, with recession or depression constantly under discussion, a look at the work of a photographer from a previous era reminds us that things could be a lot worse. We will not reach the depths of the depression suffered in the 1930s this time around. We started from a much higher level. Dorothea Lange's photographs offer us perspective, and reason to be grateful that most of us did have a very different starting point.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey on 26 May 1895, Ms Lange studied photography at Columbia University, then did studio portrait work. She married painter Maynard Dixon and they travelled through the south western states, where she photographed Native Americans.


This photographer's fame comes mainly from her work during the Great Depression when she began documenting the suffering populace, breadlines, and strikes. Her first marriage over, she had re-married a labour economist and together they were employed by the California and Federal Resettlement Administration.
Their job: to record the Dust Bowl exodus when drought and hard times forced thousands of farm families to move west in search of work. Later, during World War
2 she documented the internment of Japanese Americans.



Ms Lange's best known photograph is a portrait titled "Migrant Mother".


This is said to be one of the most reproduced photographs in history. It has its own back story too.
The family of the woman, subject of the portrait, later objected to the way their mother had been depicted. She was, they said, not a true migrant, the family had lived in California for many years, but had fallen on hard times. They had been staying overnight at the camp where Ms Lange found them, on their way elsewhere to new work. Years later, however, when their mother fell ill and in need of expensive care and tratement, a local newspaper covered the story and re-printed the photograph. This jogged the memory of numerous readers who had found comfort from that photograph years earlier during their own bad times. Thousands of dollars rolled in to the newspaper, to aid the former "Migrant Mother".

Dorothea Lange died of cancer in 1965.

There's no time of birth available, the chart below is set for noon. Rising sign will be inaccurate, as will exact degree of the Moon which would have been in either Gemini or Cancer at the time of her birth.




This is an interesting chart, made up entirely of Air and Water emphasis. Rising sign could add a different element, of course. Gemini and Cancer in a fairly tight large cluster, with a dash of Scorpio added.

"Dorothea Lange’s work reflects insight, compassion and profound empathy for her subjects. Her photographs are reproduced in books and housed in museum collections, most numerously in the Oakland Museum of California. Although she did not consider herself to be an artist, she said of her work: “To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable…But I have only touched it, just touched it.” "

Insight empathy and compassion come via Water signs Cancer and Scorpio, her inner need to communicate what she saw with the world at large comes from Gemini, the zodiac's main communicator. Without a time of birth which would show us where the angles of the chart lay, it's not easy to say much more! Her two Scorpio planets, Saturn and Uranus harmonize with the Cancer planets by trine aspect, drawing in some extra passion for any job she undertook, and adding a certain sharpness to her insight, which, if coming only from Cancer planets might have produced a maudlin or sentimental set of photographs, instead of the colder, harder but more representative images she left for us.





More at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92656801
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Dorothea_Lange.html