In Landscape Southwest, McKie Trotter offers the viewer an abstracted landscape, a desert-scape. This simplified, geometric work is rendered in a restricted palette of deep purple, red, and brown. It exhibits Trotter’s firm conceptual grasp on how to build space with limited form and muted tonality. Working somewhere in between abstraction and realism, Trotter is able to capture the essential characteristics of nature. Employing child-like symbolism, Trotter evokes the spirit of cacti and the red-hot Southwestern sun. With clusters of vertical streaks and a red circle, Landscape Southwest contains the fundamentals of a desert-scape at dawn or dusk. The four cacti, ranging in size, give the composition depth. The red circle, the sun, hanging high in the sky, anchors the composition in reality and imbues the composition with light, life, and energy.

Born in 1918 in Manchester, Georgia, McKie “Mac” Massenburg Trotter III studied art and French at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He attended graduate school at the University of Georgia for a short time before World War II broke out. At first, Trotter served as a bugler in the National Guard. Then he served as an infantry officer in Europe. He was captured by the Germans and held for nine months as a prisoner of war. He eventually gained his freedom and returned to the United States in 1945. Trotter continued his graduate-level studies at the University of Georgia, eventually earning his MFA. In 1948, he accepted a teaching position at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. He would call Fort Worth home for the next fifty years. In 1954, Trotter’s art was included in the Younger American Painters show at the Guggenheim Museum. From 1953 until 1988, Trotter was a professor of art at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.