About this work
*South from Quartz Mountain* is an oil on canvas board, modest in scale at 10" × 14", painted in October 1927. What it captures is the austere grandeur of a landscape most painters never bothered to find. The Quartz Mountains of southwestern Oklahoma rise to a maximum elevation of 1,887 feet in Greer County — part of the ancient Wichita range, formed 550 million years ago as a failed continental rift and uplifted 300 million years ago.
Most of Quartz Mountain is composed of homogeneous pink-red Lugert Granite, and that mineral warmth almost certainly bleeds into Dixon's palette here — the tawny earth tones, amber rock faces, and wide Oklahoma sky that stretch south from the summit. Dixon's signature technique — bold masses of color with simplicity of line — suited this spare, wind-scoured terrain perfectly. The small format concentrates the effect: there is nothing extraneous. A low horizon anchors the composition, the granite terrain locks the foreground, and the sky opens above with the structural authority that defines his best work.
By 1925, Dixon's style had changed dramatically to even more powerful compositions, with the emphasis on design, color, and self-expression — and "the power of low horizons and marching cloud formations, simplified and distilled, became his own brand and at once were both bold and mysterious." October 1927 sits squarely in that confident stride. That year, Dixon was experimenting with non-objective art and exploring ideas related to modernism, as his western landscapes began to incorporate broad, clean areas of color, sharp definition of edges, and subtle gradations of hue.
He also joined several prominent artists that year in a boycott of the Bohemian Club Annual Exhibition when works by more modern artists were excluded — a sign of his deepening commitment to a progressive aesthetic that paintings like this one quietly embody. That Dixon found his way to Oklahoma's granite hills, far from his usual Southwestern desert circuit, speaks to the restlessness of this period.
This is a painting for rooms that can hold a little silence. Its horizontal pull and earth-warm palette settle naturally into spaces with natural light and uncluttered walls — a study, a hallway with southern exposure, a living room that leans toward the spare rather than the ornate. For those who know Dixon's work, form, color, and country are the three basic elements
