Dixie Friend Gay, "Nuzzle," mixed media on wood, 2006. Used with permission.

Artist Dixie Friend Gay finds inspiration in the American natural landscape. Case in point: Where some might have seen a barren Texas winter landscape, Gay saw a paintable sunset of light pinks and browns when she landed in San Angelo Thursday evening for the opening of her “Moments in Nature” exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts.

“I think this will be a stop on our way to someplace else sometime,” Gay says.

Gay’s been to a lot of “someplaces.” It’s how she finds the “resource material” germane to her paintings. Recent landscapes she’s photographed with the intent to paint include China; a hilly landscape outside San Francisco; and Ragsdale, north of Chicago, to behold the prairie land in its pre-frost glory. She’s attending a residency in Ireland in August, in the idyllic waters and lush greenery surrounding the Tyrone Guthrie Centre.

“It’s a totally rural area, breathtaking landscape,” Gay says of the location. “It’s on a lake with ancient hues, and the landscape is so incredibly green. I’ll be there for a month, and they’re providing me with sleeping space, and studio space, and all my meals. All I have to do is show up for dinner.”

Gay captures landscapes around the world through photography, whether in Ireland or hiking in a rural area around her home in Houston. Some look like surreal photographs of nature gone animated. Some look like photograph negatives of a plant’s more intimate parts, like naked, amplified stigma. Almost plant porn.

By the time Gay looks at the pictures from a particular trip, years can have passed—if she looks at them too quickly after a trip, she says, the snapshots inevitably don’t live up to her vivid memory. When she does use the photographs, they become the starting point for her paintings, which can take on a photographic quality in the glossiness of the water, or the way she renders the delicate softness of flower innards.

Gay achieves her signature verisimilitude through a tedious, digital-heavy process.

“I start with photographs that I manipulate in Photoshop,” Gay says. “I sometimes layer them over other images, so I end up with two images. But they all start out as photo-based images.

“Before [around] 2003, I was painting traditionally somewhat, like the Hudson River Valley painters. I was very interested in their political stance—in preserving the wilderness, etc. That was over 100 years ago. So my work really harkened back to an earlier time.”

Gay’s pictures almost always start in the digital format these days. “I have a digital projector, so I do an abstract painting of the general lights and darks, and make that work,” she says. “And then I take [the] image on top of that and draw the elements of the photograph onto the canvas, and then I go back and paint very meticulously.”

Gay has commissioned works and exhibits all around the nation, including one called “Houston Bayou” at the Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport. “Moments in Nature,” her exhibit in the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, runs through March 30.