Before his desert painting days though, Forsythe came to New York in 1904 to attend the Art Student League. While there he worked for the New York Journal with colleague Jimmy Swinnerton. After a brief stint at a St. Louis newspaper, he returned to Los Angeles, and worked for the "Examiner." After some success, Forsythe was recruited by newspaper publisher William Randolf Hearst to replace George Harriman as cartoonist for the New York American. It was at this time, during World War I, that he created many war posters, and he met young artist named Norman Rockwell. Forsythe was a mentor for Rockwell, and introduced him to the Saturday Evening Post.

Prior to Forsythe's birth in Orange, California, his parents ran a store in Tombstone, Arizona right next to the OK Corral.

When Vic came to the desert, he not only painted, but roamed and explored. He sat at prospector's camp fires, listened to their tall tales. He lived in ghost towns amid "their crumbling walls and vanished glory." The desert for Forsythe was not just a visual experience, he became part of the desert.

On some of his desert painting excursions, he would take a younger artist, a newer member of the fraternity of desert painters, John W. Hilton. Hilton recalled Forsythe's dry acerbic wit, and how he had insulting nicknames for his friends ... the more insulting, the better the friendship. Forsythe once said of John Hilton, "You're thirteenth on my list of fellas I can do without." Yet Forsythe would seek Hilton out for desert camping and painting trips.

On the occasion of Vic and Cotta's Golden Wedding anniversary, Hilton writes that the fraternity repaid Forsythe with a roast filled with affectionate insults. Ed Ainsworth writes of the occasion, "nobody dared get sentimental ... all the guests heartily insulted Vic to the best of their ability, although all fell far short of Vic's own superlative talents in that line."

Hilton writes about Forsythe's technique. "Clyde had a theory which he called 'dynamic symmetry'. He would use a series of carefully calculated triangles drawn in charcoal, and before he started to paint, his canvas would look like a modern impressionistic drawing." These trips allowed Hilton to sharpen his ideas of balance and harmony.

Ed Ainsworth recalls Forsythe speaking of the desert painters. " 'We were kind of pioneers,' Clyde confesses. 'Nobody thought the California desert was worth much of anything. People were scared of the heat and the snakes. They never thought of the desert as a place of beauty.' " Ainsworth goes on to write that because of the desert painters, the deserts of the Southwest began to attract national attention.

Sources: Ed Ainsworth, Painters of the Desert, 1960., Katherine Ainsworth, The Man Who Captured Sunshine, 1978.