A highlight of my summer travels out West was an artist residency at the Thunderbird Foundation Maynard Dixon home.

Maynard Dixon is well-known American landscape painter who travelled extensively through the Southwest in the mid-1900s. His interpretations of the desert are among my most favorite works of art. When my family visited southern Utah in 2022, we visited the property in Orderville where he settled in his later years with wife Edith. Their log cabin is decorated with items that belonged to the couple, and reproductions of Dixon’s paintings.

The home, studio, and accessory buildings are maintained now by the Thunderbird Foundation, and open to visitors to tour, year round. They welcome artists for short residencies in the home and studio. I was fortunate enough to secure three days in July 2023 for myself!

And so, taking a pause from my family and our camping adventures, I embarked on my first residency as a painter. My husband and son dropped me off at the property on a Sunday around noon.

I’d brought a few paints and my sketchbook along on our trip, but I also shipped myself large birch panels and additional supplies specifically for the residency. I set up my supplies in Dixon’s spacious, windowed studio and got some opening layers down on the panels. For the rest of the day I alternately painted, enjoyed a big salad for lunch, took a short nap, watched birds on the grounds (yellow warbler, Cooper’s hawk, hummingbirds) and did an exercise from my painting mastermind group (Art2Life Academy). I baked a small frozen lasagne for dinner, read Tony Hillerman on the patio while it cooked, and then went back to the studio after dinner with a glass of wine to paint more before bed.

Day two was my one full day of solitude. It would normally take me a lot longer to make progress on new pieces, but the uninterrupted time and the invitation to focus really seems to enhance productivity. Ideas flowed and creative steps just presented themselves to me. I finished two pieces that day - they were nothing but a blue background when I woke up that morning, but by the time I retired for the night, they were finished. They also would be the first two of this series to sell. I had two more in process to work on the following day.

Between creative periods in the studio, I enjoyed coffee and a bagel for breakfast, made a salad again for lunch, took a short nap and had a second coffee (iced, it’s hot outside). A slow dinner break with a glass of wine and some reading refreshed me enough to put in another couple of hours before climbing into bed.

I started bright and early on my third day - with a “deadline” of around 3pm to clean up and pack away work before being picked up by my family. Again, I was surprised by how much I was able to get done in such a short time, with dedicated space and freedom to follow my flow. I finished the two remaining pieces - one of which I reworked entirely based on an idea that came to me in the night.

My goals for this time were to channel my feelings for desert spaces into paintings that used my own abstract approach to interpret these landscapes that have seduced me, and feed my senses. I met that goal, and finished the residency with a sense that I had levelled up my own skills and widened the possibilities for what I can create. I left feeling creatively nourished, confident that I’d spent my time well, and excited about what I’d made.

I am grateful to the Thunderbird Foundation for the opportunity. My heart is fullest in the desert, and creating these paintings there where I most love to be made me feel brilliantly alive.