About this work
is a pairing of two small-scale works on paper that captures the full breadth of Dixon's eye in a single glance — one turned outward toward a river scene, the other inward toward a fleeting, almost private observation. The first work, *Navajo Bathers on the Little Colorado, Arizona*, is rendered in watercolor and charcoal on paper (4½ × 6¼ inches); the second, *Standing Bull (I Saw His Antlers!)*, is watercolor and ink on paper (5 × 3 inches) and bears Dixon's initials dated 1931. The river piece places figures at the edge of the Little Colorado — the shallow, copper-tinted artery that cuts across the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona — while the bull sketch announces itself with the candid enthusiasm of a field note, the parenthetical title functioning almost like a whispered aside, the mark of a man paying close attention to everything around him. Together, the two works read as a day in the field distilled: the human and the wild, observed without embellishment.
The 1931 date places *Standing Bull* in what was, by multiple accounts, one of Dixon's most prolific and inspired periods — a stretch when his modernist vocabulary had fully crystallized and his eye for the Southwest was at its sharpest. Through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, Dixon's work increasingly emphasized stark geometric forms, flattened perspectives, and luminous skies, with travels to Arizona's Navajo reservation shaping his prioritization of elemental forces over detailed narrative.
He lived among the figures he painted, spending extended time among the Hopi, Navajo, and Blackfoot — a commitment that gives works like these their quality of witness rather than tourism. As Dixon put it: "Painting, as I see it, must be human rather than arty." These two sheets embody exactly that: quick, honest, alive.
On a wall, this pair rewards patience. Small works on paper — especially paired ones — ask the viewer to draw close, and Dixon gives them reason to linger. They belong somewhere intimate: a study lined with books, a hallway where the morning light falls low and lateral, or alongside a larger Dixon canvas where their sketchbook energy provides counterpoint. Writers about Dixon often note his particular understanding of "the space and loneliness of the West," and here that quality arrives not in sweeping panorama but in two small sheets of paper — a swimmer on a desert river, a bull glimpsed in the brush — that together make a world entirely his own.
