PIECES

After earning a bachelor’s degree at Drury and some art history and studio art credits at Southwestern Missouri State in Springfield, Dixon enrolled in a small program at a large university to continue his art education. He began graduate school at the University of Arkansas, in an art program with 15 art faculty and 30 art graduate students.

"This is a sociological observation," Dixon begins, "but it seems obvious to me that people are always more comfortable and more productive in environments where they feel familiar. I grew up in a little town. I went to Drury intentionally so I didn’t get lost in the numbers. I kept choosing small environments because I just felt that I could negotiate them better, that I would get more out of them. I guess essentially that I’ve always put myself in situations where, when I needed some information, I knew immediately who to go to, where to go to get that information. So I always chose that small environment. I knew from past experience that in those small environments, people were there because they saw themselves as facilitators. I needed facilitators, rather than being left alone, I needed facilitators to answer questions or to get me to the next point. My early years made me instinctively good at finding those people. It’s kind of like a hunter looking for squirrels. I kind of knew where they’d be hanging out, I knew where I could find them, and I knew where they wouldn’t be."

At Arkansas, Dixon found his niche in art. The faculty at the new Phillip Johnston Art Center, the first art center conceptualized to involve all of the arts together in one building, was hired in the 1950s. Most were abstract expressionists when Dixon entered graduate school in the late 1960s. Before going to Arkansas, Dixon had consistently worked figuratively and rather photographically with his art. In his senior year at Drury and during the one year at Southwestern Missouri State, his art became more impressionistic and expressionistic, with looser paint, brighter and gaudier colors, but he continued working with recognizable human figures and landscapes, and his work was visibly narrative, always telling a story. After Dixon worked seven months in a totally abstract genre at Arkansas, the art professors told him to go back to working with figures, which he gladly did. He returned to exploring the narrative aspects of his art. "There’s been something in my work all along in which the narrative aspect has been very important, and it’s been an exploration to try to see what that was all about, what it is I’m trying to narrate, what it is I’m really trying to say and lay out, and why it’s important to me to be a communicator in that kind of sense. Maybe I see myself as a facilitator."

In graduate school, Dixon found a model in the artist Max Beckman, who worked in St. Louis at Washington University at the end of World War II and whose work is largely represented at the St. Louis Museum of Art. Beckman was Jewish and living in Germany, and he got out of the country at the last minute before being persecuted by the Nazis. "His paintings were very figurative, very narrative, very mythological, very metaphoric, very congested, very dramatic and very theatrical," Dixon says. "It really impressed me that they were very deep in terms of story line and very much about people and history because Beckman had carried the whole pre-war and war experience with him, and it found its way into his paintings. His pieces were so wonderful, and often they were like characters dressed in mythological costumes from a Greek play, but from a sociological point of view or a historical point of view, I realized that his painting was a story about World War II. It’s all about different dimensions and levels of reality."

In Beckman, Dixon also found a technique in painting that he has carried through in all of his work. "Beckman had a particular technique he worked with that allowed him to begin painting not knowing what he was going to paint. I knew I wanted to discover the subject matter during the creative act," Dixon explains. Beckman often painted areas of his canvas black first and painted figures on top of those black spaces, so that the black underground on the painting remained as the shadows on the figures. "It was a trick in oils that was really easy to work with because I was putting light on dark. I thought this technique would allow me to begin painting without knowing where I was going. I could begin with this dark surface, the void, I could put an image on there and rearrange as I went. I could go back to black at any point, erase and build again."

Dixon sees his puzzle piece triptychs as translations, different perspectives and different points of view. "The world is not one thing. Reality cannot be defined as a simple one way of looking at something. Reality is a sum total of all the ways it can be looked at, and it changes continually as new ways of looking at it are added to the mix," he says. "I know my work would not be acceptable to me unless it has the kind of depth that can be approached from multiple perspectives. People can bring their own information to the work and add to it. The work is not one thing, frozen within itself, but it has the chance to grow and become something else because of what can be brought to it by some other viewer," he says.

He points out a piece of his from 1997, titled Order and Disorder: Point of View, which features Gertrude Stein in the bridge, or center panel. On one side is an aerial geological view of the Caprock; on the other is a landscape of the McDonald Observatory overlooking the ancient Permian Ocean. The text is about ancient highways. Dixon says in the piece he offers multiple views of a place, through memory, history, telescopes and satellites. "One can look at the Earth in this particular piece in multiple views, like with a geological map, and the implications of the telescopes of suddenly looking out there, penetrating space. Something I realized early on here in Texas is how the highways are often laid out on all the trails which were cattle trails, bison trails, Indian trails," he says. The text of Point of View reads: "Daily, he drove a route which had been used for thousands of years. First it was used by nomadic Indians, then by conquistadors, then by eastern settlers and, finally, by highway crews which turned the old dust trail into concrete. To pass the time each day on the long commute home he would talk into a tape recorder and expose a stream of consciousness, as thoughts and ideas would come to his mind, often triggered by what he saw along the ancient highway."

He credits his teachers at Drury College for his multilayered approach to art. "Drury clarified for me the idea that the act of making art means that you are a historian when you make art, you are a dancer when you make art, you are a psychologist when you make art, you are a sociologist when you make art, and at the same time, you are doing something psychologically important for yourself by solving personal problems," he explains. "I have to hope that my pieces are problem solving on a larger scale, the cultural, historical, sociological level for other people. I hope people are able to use the work to clarify things, to come to some conclusions and observations that they would not have had otherwise."

"One of the basic points I want the Order and Disorder series to make is that literally we are in 2002 now, Classical Idealism was in Renaissance philosophy 500 years ago and 19th century Romanticism began roughly 150 years ago. Existentialism is 50 years old. And, today, people embrace parts of all of these philosophies. Within our time period, all of the philosophies that have ever been given to us still exist. None of them go away. In my work, Classical Idealism, Romanticism, Cubism, Impressionism are here at the same moment, even though they are different worlds," Dixon says. "There’s order and disorder – which is ordered and which is not ordered depends upon where you stand when you look at it. It’s a balancing act."

That bridge in between the polarities in Dixon’s work often concludes that Mother Nature is the healing hand. "The natural world has been that healing hand, even growing up in the hills of Missouri. Confusion dissolves in those spaces and those places are essential in my life to keep perspective and balance," he says. Dixon explains that the larger central image in his work is often the mediator between the Classical side, which can be considered to be too structured, clear and determined, and the Abstract side, which can be considered too loose and too vague. "The natural world is very good about reminding people what life on Earth is about. An image that’s never left me, that I read some years ago, is about the discovery of a watering hole in Nebraska. In the early Pleistocene, some rhinos were around the water hole and as they drank, a cloud of volcanic ash descended from some eruption on the West Coast, and turned them into fossils, standing around the watering hole. All fossil situations are evidence of violence, evidence of catastrophes. That was a startling thing to realize," he notes, mentioning that the volcano has become a favorite image in his pieces.

Dixon’s work shows that the present, future and history recycle themselves in different combinations, and he attempts to destroy any concept of absolute linearity through his puzzle pieces, styles, texts and layered images. Art historian Glen R. Brown has written that in Order and Disorder, Dixon undermines aesthetic presence through multiple strategies, the most prominent of which is a critique of linear history, the basis for a theory of progress and such concepts as the avant-garde. "It was the dialectical action of linear history that assured the cohesiveness of the modernist object, that located, isolated and transfixed it. Every new movement, through negotiation of certain aspects of its antecedent, resulted in the synthesis of an entirely new entity, poised upon the thin line of the vanguard. At the same time, it was possible to trace backward from the object a lineage that both proved its novelty and confirmed that it was not an isolated mutation but a legitimate heir to the critical spotlight. Linear history was the object’s inertia. It is this linear history, the continuous narrative, that Dixon’s work disrupts, albeit covertly. His strategy is not one of destruction, an attack from without, but deconstruction, a dismantling from within linear history itself. … The alternative concept of history this configuration suggests is embodied metaphorically in the puzzle pieces; each section of the triptych is pieced together from the random fragments of historical possibility. …Rather than constituting an evolution, the three stages, the three historical epochs, exist as separate constructs analogically linked to one another only by the distribution of the components around a central door. … Order and Disorder is a work about the construction of knowledge, the fabrication of objects out of a multitude of decontextualized puzzle pieces or wind-born particles of earth – signifiers freed of a signified – in the unending search for a transcendental truth."

Art critic Dan R. Goddard of the San Antonio Express-News, writes, "Dixon tries to see his paintings the same way physicists have come to think of light: as both a particle and a wave. His paintings can be absorbed whole or broken down into component parts. While formal problems influence his experiments, the images remain simple and accessible … But he fits the images together in amazing ways. The results are kaleidoscopic constructions that pile meanings on top of meanings."

Dixon says he has been privileged to live the life of an artist that his father was not blessed with. His works are included in public collections in museums in Fort Worth, San Antonio, Kansas City, Kalamazoo, Mich., Miami, Fla., and Cleveland, Ohio, among many others. The Davis Gallery in Austin and the William Campbell Contemporary Art in Fort Worth represent him.

Dixon may go to nature for his calm, but the extensive daily reading he does in the sciences and social sciences also influences his muse. Dixon says he reads science as his inspiration rather than art history texts or art journals. "I read the science journals or the education journals to see what art is about. Or I read in some other area to see how my thinking is running concurrent or adversely to what’s going on in other disciplines. I see an incredible dynamic, which is always in play, and that is that scholars each in their own fields are talking about the same things. There’s a cultural dynamic in finding the thing that is not yet solved. Culture is a language and an organism of its own kind. My pieces are a temporary resolution suggesting some interrelationships among the parts, but I’m really asking the viewer to peel off the next layer, to make the next thought," he says.

Dixon sees his participation in his art as the act of taking a mirror to show back everything he has observed and thought, every piece of information that he has gathered, to reflect without judgment, not unlike a scientist, to observe phenomena and to present observations. "I think the thing I do that a scientist would do too is that I start sorting: all things Classical, all things Romantic, all things Expressionist, as representatives for those different viewpoints. Without making a judgment, as an artist I put them into an interesting visual order, implying that order is a very temporal thing. Order is based on taste, of just right now, and will soon decay and fall apart. Even what order is, artistically, changes. In my work, I make compositions that use color, pattern, texture, whatever I can find that will let the images and ideas, for a moment, live side-by-side, looking like they are in the same world, but that in fact, they are just pieces of the puzzle."