Clouds of a Summer Afternoon

2025 will arrive soon, and with today's painting, we want to encourage you to check out our beautiful DailyArt Desk Calendar; you can find this Maynard Dixon masterpiece featured there. Head over to the DailyArt Shop (today only with a 20% discount)!  :) 

Although in declining health and slowly dying from emphysema that robbed his lungs of air, Maynard Dixon found 1945 to be a productive time. Despite having only a year to live, he made numerous exploratory excursions into the surrounding Sonoran Desert, sketching and painting the austere landscape. 

One of the works he painted in 1945, Clouds of a Summer Afternoon, was most likely created somewhere between the Rillito north of Tucson and the Tohono Oʼodham Reservation. Dixon knew that during July and August, thick white clouds from the Gulf of California would form and move throughout the day in a vast panorama, marching over the horizon. Arizona desert clouds hang in the blue sky, row after row, receding into infinity, perfectly poised above the landscape below. Sensitive to the horizon line, with the upper three-fourths of the canvas devoted to the sky and clouds, Dixon shaped a feeling of immense distance in the painting.

P.S. Cirrus, stratus, or cumulus ... clouds have inspired numerous masterpieces. Join us as we take a look at clouds in art!