Capturing "The Magic Moment" in Mt. Carmel: "East of Diana's Throne," a 1933 oil painting by Maynard Dixon. (Courtesy of The Thunderbird Foundation for the Arts)

By Martin Renzhofer
The Salt Lake Tribune

    MT. CARMEL -- People living and working at this town in southern Utah call it "The Magic Moment."
    It lasts but a moment -- a time just before sunset when the shadows dancing on the Paunsaugunt Plateau separate into dramatic borders of light and dark.
    Acclaimed painter Maynard Dixon found the spot so inspiring that he made Mt. Carmel his summer home, traveling north from Arizona when Tucson temperatures soared.     While the changing tableau has always inspired painters and photographers, sometimes it inspired writers, too. Vladimir Nabokov finished his controversial novel Lolita at Mt. Carmel when Dixon's widow and third wife, Edith Hamlin, was renting rooms for artists and such during the 1950s.
    "When I was a kid, I used to sit there and watch dad at work," said Dixon's son, Daniel. Daniel Dixon, now 78, discovered early that he did not have the creative eye of an artist.
    "I'd look out there at what my dad was looking at and I couldn't see it. I could see what he was seeing when he finished."
    For more than 50 years, Dixon translated his vision of the American Southwest, including southern Utah, with oil to canvas. As with most Western painters -- for example, Charles Russell -- popular acclaim came late. But it came.
    Writer Thomas McGuane said o! f Dixon that "no painter has ever quite understood the light, the distances, the aboriginal ghostliness of the American West as well as Maynard Dixon."