DIG DISCOVERY # 1 - Meet Edgar Payne
…….. Edgar Alwin Payne
1883-1947 ………
Edgar Alwin Payne was a California artist working in the plein air landscape tradition and who traveled through out the wilderness areas of California, into the Southwest, and to Europe painting side-by-side with his wife Elsie. Payne was born in Washborn, Missouri and grew up in the Ozarks, where his deep love for nature began. Essentially self-taught, Edgar Payne studied briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago and spent several years as a house painter, sign painter, scenic artist and mural decorator before turning to full-time easel painting. He moved to California in 1909 and maintained studios in Laguna Beach and Los Angeles. Payne initiated and became the founding president of the Laguna Beach Art Association……………
Edgar’s paintings are bold in color and form, and while not photo realistic, are more sharply realistic than traditional Impressionistic styles of painting popular at the turn of the century in America and Europe. His style of painting is more akin to the Taos Society of Artists painting the Southwest during the same time period. He painting many images of the Sierras, of pastoral California landscapes and ocean shorelines, and these striking canyon landscapes from the Southwest, as well as romantic European scenes…………
Payne is regarded as one of the foremost California Impressionist painters of the early 1900s.
…….When Georgia O’Keeffe was in the eighth grade she asked a daughter of a farm employee what she was going to do when she grew up. The girl said she didn't know. Georgia recalls replying very definitely…….
"...I am going to be an artist!"--"I don't really know where I got my artist idea...I only know that by that time it was definitely settled in my mind."…………….
………Georgia O’Keefe is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century. Her fame stems not merely from the rarity of being a woman artist working successfully in a man’s world … Georgia O’Keefe has become a lasting symbol of the American West’s promise of freedom, independence, and rugged beauty. She was a fiercely independent individualist who adamantly painted her vision of the natural world, and her life embodied time honored principles of the American West – freedom to define the terms of one’s life, work, home and friends, a driving independent curiosity to explore the wide open, unspoiled spaces of the West, and the wisdom to love and respect the raw power of the magnificent western landscape down to its most intimate detail. …………………… 
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Art and social historians note that O’Keefe also embodied the ideals of the 20th century woman - to be confident of ones own inner gifts, to have a means to express those gifts and be accepted and respected for them, and to keep the company of equally gifted friends, including a supportive husband and partner. The independence she showed as an artist, painting traditional subjects in bold new ways and exhibiting in one person shows by the time she was thirty, was also reflected in her personal life as a woman able to hold her own and then marry one of the most influential photographers and gallery owners of their time, Alfred Steiglitz. But she kept the Southwest as her personal retreat, and her husband never visited her there – she instead would join him in new York for part of the year.
"My object," Dixon stated, " has always been to get as close to the real thing as possible - people, animals, country. The melodramatic Wild West is not for me the big possibility. The more lasting qualities are in the quiet and more broadly human aspects of western life. I am to interpret for the most part the poetry and pathos of life of western people seen amid the grandeur, sternness, and loneliness of their country."…………
Born in 1875 in California, he kept a studio on Montgomery Street in San Francisco that was filled with Native American blankets and art work, cow skulls and other western artifacts. Dressed in a black suit with cowboy boots and hat, Dixon personified the lean, thoughtful, introspective lone artist determined to capture the spirit of the West on canvas. He was a social critic, outspoken about the plights of human suffering, a poet, and featured images of Native Americans, victims of the Great Depression, and social unrest in his paintings. Married to the famous Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange (who took the portrait of Dixon above), Dixon’s compassion for the human condition – and the natural environment – empowered his art…………… 
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Maynard Dixon not only painted the Southwest, he lived it. Spending time living with the Hopi, Blackfoot, and Navajo Indians, he also made his home in Taos, New Mexico and Tuscon, Arizona, keeping his summer cabin in Mt. Carmel, Utah. Of his paintings, which also adorned the covers of the well known magazines of the time, Dixon said
“This is my mark, this is the mark I make upon your heart. … It is my testimony to life, and therefore I cannot lie in paint.”
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Thomas Moran was born on 12 February 1837 in Bolton, England, the son of a hand-loom weaver whose life had bee irrevocably changed by the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Displace by labor-saving machinery, Thomas Moran Sr. Emigrated to America. He settled his family near Philadelphia in 1844. …………
The young Thomas first had short apprenticeship with an engraving firm, and then went to work in the studio of his older brother Edward, also an aspiring artist. Together they took many sketching trips in the forest surroundings. ……….. After the opening of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the US Government began planning geologic survey expeditions that would bring engineers and artists into the American wilderness. In the summer of 1871 Moran traveled to Virginia City, Montana, where he joined the first government-sponsored expedition to Yellowstone…………. Working with William Henry Jackson, the expedition photographer, Moran completed numerous watercolor sketches of Yellowstone’s hot springs, mudpots, geysers, and waterfalls. Although intended for his personal use, Moran’s watercolors ( along with Jackson’s photographs ) were shown to members of Congress, who then voted to set aside Yellowstone as America’s first national park in March 1872. …………… 
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Shortly thereafter Congress appropriated $10,000 for the purchase of Moran’s Grand Canyon at Yellowstone, the painting that launched his career and it measured seven by twelve feet. …………….. An art critic called his paintings the "most brilliant and poetic pictures that have been done in America thus far". Thomas Moran had established himself as one of America's foremost artists...and led to an invitation by Major John Wesley Powell to accompany his survey team on a trip to The Grand Canyon of the Colorado. 
Moran wrote home to his wife during this trip …
"The whole gorge for miles lay beneath us and it was by far the most awfully grand and impressive scene that I have ever yet seen..."
Moran painted a large 7’ x 12’ mural scale painting of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado that became the companion to his Yellowstone masterpiece. He also completed sketches, drawings and standard scale paintings of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite, and was a return visitor to the Grand Canyon. As the railroads opened the west to tourism, Moran’s painting and drawings were to grace to covers and illustrations of the brochures published by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad to draw visitors to the Southwest. His paintings also continued to influence the formation of new National Parks, giving the politicians in distant Washington DC a look at the magnificent wilderness of the West……….
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In 1922, Thomas Moran relocated to Santa Barbara, California where he spent the last four years of his life.
What is this painter famous for ? 
What do you like the most about this painting? 
And how did this painters work help preserve America’s amazing natural wonders? 
It is called “East of Diana’s Throne” ……. What gives you a good clue as to who the painter was ? 
Dig # 1
Cowboys are going far.
