Art: Southwest Painter

Regionalism, once a coursing stream in U.S. art, today is a dry ditch, and probably a very good thing too. The astounding vistas of the opening West have become familiar to a nation on wheels; most regional art has degenerated into picturesque views suitable for sale to tourists at roadside stands. Art viewers have come to expect more from artists than a pleasant rendering of a sunset over the Grand Canyon or the pine-studded shores of Rockport, Me.

Taproots. But every artist has to live somewhere, and each must face the problem of how to sink taproots in one locality, while at the same time raising his painting to a level that transcends mere reportage. Nowhere is the problem more difficult than under the empty vault of the great U.S. Southwest, with its endless horizons, dwarfing mountains and picturesque hangovers from the wild and woolly past. One of the new Southwest artists to face, and largely solve, this problem is Otis Dozier, 52, currently being hailed with a retrospective one-man show at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.

Dozier is a senior member of a group of Texas painters who have evolved what Manhattan’s Whitney Museum Associate Director Lloyd Goodrich calls “abstract art based on the character of Texas landscape.” Texas born and bred, Dozier got his start doing PWAP murals, then put in seven years of study under Boardman Robinson at Colorado Springs’ Fine Arts Center: “I must have done 6,000 sketches of mining towns, rocks and the human figure.”

The Essential Feeling. Although he now bases himself in Dallas, Dozier is constantly on the prowl, ranging from the bayous to the Big Bend with sketchbook in hand. Says Dozier, with a shy pride: “I can recognize any sound I hear at night and tell what kind of animal or insect made it. As I’ve grown older, I’ve gotten more interested in the architecture of how things grow. Mountains have a bony structure, just like everything else. When you realize a mountain is a moving thing, you know there is movement in everything.” Having first made dozens of sketches, he ends up not using any. Says he: “By then I don’t have to lean on any crutches. I’ve got the essential feeling.”

Otis Dozier’s themes—grasshoppers and bulls, Indian corn in the hot summer fields, a humid-swamp night scene—can be readily identified by any Texan. But his grasshopper is not just a laboratory specimen; it is a wondrous creature of heat and noise. When he painted Brahma Bull, Dozier did not try to provide a guessing game for Texas cattlemen adept at estimating values on the hoof, but to capture “the thing you always feel about a bull. He’s the most powerful of the animal kingdom, and he seems to know it.” In Place in the Desert (see cut), viewers are more likely to respond to Dozier’s sense of the earth’s architecture, with its hard, crystalline ribs and the harsh, hot feel of the desert, than to pinpoint its location. Said Texan Dozier, who consciously aims to break the bonds of regionalism : “You’ve got to start from where you are and hope to get to the universal.”