Seeing is not believing; seeing is perceiving. Human beings of any level of experience register the beauty of nature - or, indeed, anything else - in their mind's eye, and then construct an organizing principal that allows them to make sense of the scene before them. Personal experience is the chief tool for building this structure. Cultural influences and education also come into play, of course - but beyond all other factors is a sixth sense that belongs uniquely to each individual. This is the single factor that allows people to understand what they see on their own terms.

Ken Dixon's art gives visible form to this process. His central image is usually a fine painting of a landscape, a figure, or another recognizable subject. He then moves beyond the traditional boundaries of most paintings by adding associative elements that refract his core idea and expand it into the realms of philosophy, memory, and dream. He may add a metaphorical frame and extend it outward into other forms; he may create jigsaw puzzle edges that dissolve into the surrounding environment, thus providing viewers with a means of connection to their own lives. He may choose a subject such as an oxbow on the Hudson River, creating an allegory of divergence and reconciliation.

Dixon's art makes up in immediacy what it reserves in accessibility. The viewer is welcomed by a tactile, seductive image built to a human scale, and then is challenged to decipher it. The artist packs his work with subtle references and compositional clues that reward introspection as well as inspection. True to the nature of intuition, each person appreciates and relates to all of Dixon's work but responds strongly to a few specific images, claiming and incorporating them into his or her own basic viewpoint.

The foundation of Dixon's work is not art history, but science. He studies the intricacies of migration. He reads about unifying devices and strange attractors; about chaos and unpredictability; about order and disorder. He is particularly interested in books that talk about pattern, and the fractal-like unity of the micro and macro elements of the universe. Pattern, he observes, holds everything together; it lays history out flat so that it can be seen whole.

Dixon finds endless ways to re-state the conundrum of existence. He splinters reality into shining fragments and reassembles it into a new and ultimately comprehensible form in which a vision curves back in on itself like an oxbow in a river. Through multiplicity and, above all, simultaneity, Dixon creates images of perception itself, rather than representations of the perceived.- Suzanne Deats

Ken Dixon earned his MFA from the University of Arkansas in 1967. He is a recipient of a Mid-America Arts Alliance Award presented by the National Endowment for the Arts. Dixon has exhibited extensively during the past two decades. His work hangs in many public collections including the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, the Museum of Modern Art in Miami, the Nelson-Adkins Museum in Kansas City, and the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas; and in corporate collections such as Citicorp and Southwestern Bell.