I think this painting should be titled,
The Lone Ranger And Tonto Go Out For Pizza
“I was born and raised an American. My people came from England to Virginia before the Revolution; fought in that conflict and did their part in forming the new Republic; went west to the Mississippi in 1820 and prospered with the country; lost everything in the Civil War and in 1868 came to California to make a new start. My boyhood home was a raw California boom town where men drank, gambled in land values and shot one another over irrigation rights.“For us, history began (almost), with Bunker Hills and the Declaration. All our guarantees were set forth in the Bill of Rights, and that meant what it said. Under it, people could live and move; could look one another in the eye and freely discuss matters of the public interest, in open difference of opinion. This was assured to all men. It was American.
“Friendships were genuine, based on character-- not money. A man’s word could be in fact as good as his bond-- and the average was high. The subservient ‘white collar’ class was not evident; the ‘yes man’ of the big corporations had not yet become a national figure; and that bootlicking phrase, ‘the customer is always right,’ had not yet been invented….”
A TRUE westerner, not the posers who inhabit California today. And this from Western writer, Wilbur Hall in Sunset Magazine, January 1921:
“Dixon is a man well worth knowing, well worth describing, because he is part of the vital West of today and tomorrow, part interpreter, historian and perpetuator of its best truth on canvas…. If there is anything of a western type, not only of mind, bearing, physique, habit, nature, temperament and viewpoint but of heart and soul, it expresses Maynard Dixon and is expressed in him.He sounds like a guy you would love to have a beer with on the trail. He is, in short, the anti-Hillary, anti-Obama, anti-bitter-clinger, true blue American. My kind of man!“He is frank, blunt, outspoken. He is untrampled by tradition, yet a respecter of sound laws; he is free from guile, intolerant of narrowness, bigotry and hypocrisy. He was born in California and has been over almost every state of the West, not in a Pullman but on the trail. And he knows it and its people, and loves it, rather defiantly and somewhat jealousy. Moreover he is typical of its best kind of men, because he knows the faults of his country and blurts them out in meeting, when there is a chance that blurting will do some good. But sneering at the West, or misrepresenting it, either as to its character or its limitations, sets him afire.”
This captures perfectly the places I like to traipse over here in California: