James Budd Dixon

James Budd Dixon (November 26, 1900 – December 1, 1967) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and printmaker. He was a believer of the "Sausalito Six" group of San Francisco Bay Area painters.

James Budd Dixon was born to a affluent family in San Francisco, California. In the 1920s, he studied art at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was an illustrator for several campus publications. He served in the Army Air Forces in World War II, after which he returned to studying art below the G.I. Bill, this mature at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA, now the San Francisco Art Institute). Among his classmates at CSFA were additional emerging Bay Area Abstract Expressionists, including Richard Diebenkorn, John Hultberg, Frank Lobdell, Walter Kuhlman, and George Stillman. They became known as the "Sausalito Six" because most lived in the quay town of Sausalito just north of San Francisco (Dixon was one of those who did not, but he frequently met there subsequent to the others).

Throughout his life, Dixon supported himself in various ways, including as a commercial artist and an art director. In 1950 he became an assistant professor at CSFA; among his students there were Sonia Gechtoff, Byron McClintock, and Robert S. Neuman.

Dixon was both a painter and a printmaker. In the 1930s, he painted in a Social Realist style, and it wasn't until his years as a student at CSFA that he developed his characteristic time style, inspired by the early do something of Jackson Pollock. These cutting edge paintings featured dramatic strokes of brilliant, harsh color laid on in close impasto, while his prints and drawings were energized by keen lines. One critic considered him the most adventurous colorist accompanied by the first confession of Abstract Expressionists to emerge from the Bay Area. In 1948 he collaborated with additional members of the Sausalito Six to create a portfolio of 17 lithographs entitled Drawings that is considered a landmark in the archives of Abstract Expressionist printmaking.

From the 1940s onwards, Dixon exhibited regularly at galleries and museums on the West Coast and occasionally elsewhere. His output became more broken after 1960 as a drinking misfortune accelerated, and he died in San Francisco in 1967. He is buried in Golden Gate National Cemetery adjacent to his wife, Peggy Dixon (1892-1977).

Most of his discharge duty is in the accrual of the Oakland Museum (California), but a few pieces are held by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among further institutions. A small collection of papers, photographs, and slides of Dixon's undertaking is held by the Archives of American Art.