So why hasn't someone made a documentary about him before now?

Nancy Green doesn't know for sure, but she's happy to be the first. Green, a producer at Salt Lake City public-television station KUED (Channel 7), just completed "Maynard Dixon: To the Desert Again," which profiles the life and art of this fascinating former Utahn.

"Time and time again, his life paralleled the history of the West," says Green, who was surprised by the richness of Dixon's life when she began researching him two years ago. "I thought, this is a story that needs to get out there."

Though he is well-known in fine-art circles and his paintings have sold for more than $1 million, Dixon never achieved the widespread fame of other Western artists such as Frederic Remington. This may have to do with the fact that Dixon rejected the formal salons of the East and West Coast, which favored modern art at the time, and rarely exhibited his work there.

"Maynard Dixon: To the Desert Again" takes its subtitle from a poem Dixon wrote about the death of a friend. A skillful blend of archival photos, artworks, footage of Utah's redrock country and interviews with those who knew Dixon or have studied him, the 55-minute film offers a chronological account of the artist's life and influences. On a deeper level, it explores his affection for the spaces, solitude and spirit of the vanishing rural West.

Green portrays Dixon as a restless maverick who chafed at school and desk jobs and found solace from war and poverty in the lonesome beauty of the desert. Born in Fresno, Calif., Dixon began drawing as a boy and at 16 sent some sketches to Remington, who wrote him back words of encouragement.

As a young man Dixon found work as a newspaper illustrator in San Francisco. A six-month trip to Arizona and New Mexico ignited his passion for the desert and earned him regular work doing illustrations of American Indians. Then came the San Francisco earthquake, which triggered fires that ravaged Dixon's studio and much of his early work.

After an ill-fated first marriage, Dixon wed Lange, the petite but fiery photographer who became known for her iconic portraits of beggars and migrant workers during the Great Depression. She was 24; he, 45. Lange urged Dixon to include more social commentary in his work, which may have influenced his acclaimed "Forgotten Man" series of hopeless Depression-era figures. Around this time the federal government hired Dixon to document the construction of the Boulder Dam on the Colorado River in Nevada.

By now Dixon was painting full time and had developed a signature style marked by graceful composition, effective use of shadow and unsentimental simplicity. His canvases, full of clouds and earth and space but rarely people, conveyed the vast loneliness of the desert Southwest.

His long absences on painting trips doomed his marriage to Lange. He spent the last phase of his life with artist Edith Hamblin, who was almost 30 years younger when they married in 1935. Seeking a desert refuge from the big city, the couple built a log house in Mt. Carmel, east of Zion National Park, where they spent six summers, wintering in Tucson, before Dixon died in 1946. He painted until the end, completing a commissioned mural a week before his death.

"Dixon was a man of the West, not because he painted Western scenes, but because he embraces what the West was and represented: mobility, freedom, possibility and the sense of the infinite," says art curator Will South in the film.

Among the other people interviewed onscreen are Dixon biographer Donald J. Hagarty; Paul Bingham, founder of Utah-based Thunderbird Foundation, which is devoted to preserving Dixon's legacy; and Daniel Dixon, son of Dixon and Lange, who lives in Carmel, Calif. Another son, John Dixon, was uncomfortable speaking on camera but steered Green to valuable letters, photos and other materials.

Green intersperses images of Dixon's paintings with gorgeous video of desert scenery by Gary Turnier, who framed many shots at sunset to capture the painterly golden light. In some cases, Green and her crew shot from the exact spots in Utah where Dixon painted his landscapes.

A solitary and somewhat inward man, Dixon was hard to get to know. But Green believes Dixon's paintings of the West speak volumes about the man who made them.

"The way to know Maynard Dixon is through his works. It was landscape that fed him, it was landscape that kept him going," she says. "What amazed me the most about him was how passionate he was and how deeply he loved the land and the people. He really was on this artistic quest to translate emotion into paint. Through Dixon, we get to see a side of ourselves that it's important not to lose."

griggs@sltrib.com

Desert splendor

* "MAYNARD DIXON: TO THE DESERT AGAIN" premieres Wednesday at 8 p.m. on station KUED Channel 7. KUED will rebroadcast the film Nov. 26 at 4 p.m.