Ray Strong
American, 1905-2006

Requiem for Maynard Dixon, 1946
oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 30 5/8 in.

SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by Robert and Marlene Veloz
1995.4.1



Photo by Paul Karlstrom, 1993

“Look at life right around you. Look at the land! Get out, live in it! Sleep in it! Paint in it!” - Ray Strong (Karlstrom, 1993)

RESEARCH PAPER

Ray Strong’s oil on canvas “Requiem for Maynard Dixon” was painted in 1946 as an act of remembrance for his close friend, colleague and mentor, the acclaimed Western landscape painter, Maynard Dixon, at the time of his death. This particular work illustrates the strong emotional connection with which Strong related his paintings to his personal life. Just prior to Dixon’s death, Strong had spent several months assisting him with a mural of the Grand Canyon for the Santa Fe Railroad’s Pershing Square office in Los Angeles (SBMA Curatorial Labels, 2015).

This commanding landscape was painted near Quartzite, Arizona; a harsh, remote, and barren location just east of the Colorado River. Strong often used contrasts of dark and light to allow forms to emerge, such as can be seen in the foreground. But the darkness and heaviness in this particular painting is in contrast to the optimistic colors found in most of his other landscapes. (Eye Level, 2009) The limited, dark color palette reflects the barren landscape of the desert, but also provides a sense of isolation and sadness.

The somber, somewhat dark tone of the painting, as well as the subject matter of a lone mountain peak in a desert setting perhaps reflect Strong’s sense of loneliness and desolation with the loss of his close friend and mentor. The lighter tones of the foreground and the road draw the viewer’s eye towards the mountain. But the road is interrupted by the heavy, dark shapes of the foothills.

The vivid brushstrokes provide detail to the painting. In the distance the mountain rises, its summit obscured by clouds. Its peaks and craggy valleys dominate the painting’s composition. There is a sense of foreboding as if a storm may be approaching with the dark, cloudy sky.

Strong is best known for his landscape paintings of the American West. He identified strongly with the landscape quest, that whole movement of artists who found meaning for their art in nature around them. He believed that, as an artist, he should look fully at what nature was giving him for an objective, naturalist approach to landscape painting. “Requiem for Maynard Dixon” is an excellent example of his masterful ability to capture the land as he saw it.

The desert was Maynard Dixon’s sanctuary and he spent months of solitary searching in the American West as he recorded what he saw in his paintings (McKay and Dixon, 2008). It is indeed fitting that Strong would choose to memorialize his friend with this dark, majestic portrait of the stark landscape of the desert southwest.

“Requiem to Maynard Dixon” was painted “en plein air” as were almost all of Strong’s paintings. Strong preferred to immerse himself in nature as he painted. In an Oral History Interview with Ray Strong, 1993 by the Smithsonian Institution, he reported telling the director of the California School of Fine Arts where he was a young art student, “I want to paint the West. I want to paint West of the Rockies and I want to do it with integrity and sincerity.” He went on to say, “I had my sights set on trying to paint light, form, color, geology – the works – of Western landscape, in the tradition of Thomas Moran, the whole Hudson River School.” (Karlstrom, 1993) As a teacher, Strong also sought to imbue in his students this way of thinking about landscape painting. In that same 1993 interview Strong said, “And when I teach, I certainly expose my students to the vocabulary; but I still hope that when they get out before a mountain or a hill or a meadow, that they (look, want, love) fully what nature is giving them for an objective, naturalist approach to landscape painting.” (Karlstrom, 1993)

Strong was a product of the West, having been born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1905. A childhood illness required Ray to be home schooled for two years, during which time he became intrigued by painting and drawing. He left Oregon to attend the California School of Fine Arts “to learn to draw”. When the director told him that “in terms of what the art school was trying do then – build on post-Impressionists…He told me ‘You are going to be fifteen or twenty years behind the times’.” So Strong left for New York to attend the Art Students League. He says of that time, “You know about my trip to New York because I didn’t want to conform and become a secondhand French post-Impressionist painter.” (Karlstrom, 1993)

He later returned to San Francisco where he and Maynard Dixon, George Post and Frank Van Sloan founded the San Francisco Art Students League in the early 1930’s, which nurtured aspiring artists like Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. This is where his lifelong friendship and mentorship with Maynard Dixon began. He says, “I monitored Maynard’s class. I monitored Van Sloan’s class. I also studied under both of them. It was kind of a rebirth of the idea that if you’re making images, god! Give ‘em the real tools to make the images. Don’t try to imitate art and fabricate art on art, which is Maynard Dixon’s phrase.” (Karlstrom, 1993) Strong, along with his students, participated in the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s. It was in 1934 that Strong completed the painting, “Golden Gate Bridge”, which was selected by President Franklin D Roosevelt to hang in the White House.

He later returned to Oregon to work as a teacher and lecturer. In 1960 he came to Santa Barbara, California to paint nine dioramas for the Bird Hall at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. When the commission was completed, Strong and his wife, Betty, chose to stay in Santa Barbara where he continued to paint landscapes and cofounded the Santa Barbara Arts institute in 1963 (Davis, 2006). He was one of the leaders of the preservationist painters’ collective, called The Oak Group, in Santa Barbara County. Strong died at the age of 101 years old in 2006. His most successful works place him in the lineage of fine American landscape painters of the twentieth century along with his friend and fellow painter, Maynard Dixon. (Sullivan Goss, Ltd., 2015)

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Patricia Santiago, February 2016

Bibliography

Davis, Patrick. “Ray Strong 1905-2006”. Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara “Independent”, 2006.
Eye Level. “Ray Strong Paints the Golden Gate Bridge”. March 26, 2009 http://eyelevel.si.edu/2009/03/ray-strong-paints-the-golden-gate-bridge.html
Karlstrom, Paul, “Oral History Interview with Ray Strong, 1993 September 14”, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-ray-strong-11668
McKay, Jayne and Dixon, Daniel. “Maynard Dixon: Art and Spirit” Cloud World, 2008. http://www.maynarddixondoc.com/about.html
Santa Barbara Museum of Art. SBMA Curatorial Labels. “Ray Strong: Beyond Santa Barbara, 2015” https://docentssbma.org/strong-requiem-for-maynard-dixon
Sullivan Goss, Ltd., “Ray Strong (1905-2006) – American Landscape Painter”. 2015 http://www.sullivangoss.com/Ray_Strong/#Biography

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Ray Strong dedicated himself to painting the landscape in a representational manner. Born in 1905 in Corvallis, Oregon, Strong began a lifelong devotion to painting at the age of eight when required to stay indoors while recovering from a near-death case of food poisoning. In the 1920s, he attended The Art Students League in New York City and in the 1930s went on to revive a California version of The Art Students League with Maynard Dixon, George Post, and Frank van Sloan in San Francisco. During the Depression, Strong produced easel paintings and murals for the Public Works of Art Project, Strong lived in Marin County in the 1940s and 1950s, and moved to Santa Barbara in 1960, where he would live until the final years of his life. Upon his arrival to Santa Barbara, the artist was commissioned to paint background settings at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. In 1986, Strong cofounded the OAK Group in Santa Barbara, a collective of artists dedicated to painting and preserving the natural landscape.

"Requiem for Maynard Dixon" depicts a commanding landscape painted near Quartzite, Arizona, shortly after Strong's mentor Maynard Dixon died. Just prior to Dixon's death, Strong assisted him with a mural of the Grand Canyon for the Santa Fe Railroad's Pershing Square office in Los Angeles. Preferring to paint "en plein air" while immersed in nature, Strong's masterful ability in representing his surroundings is demonstrated in this work. The artist once stated, "I'm less interested in the surface of the forms than the substance of the forces that made it emerge and eroded it - the changing of time and wind and weather."

- Ray Strong: Beyond Santa Barbara, 2015