In 1946, he was the first recipient of the John F. and Anna Lee Stacey Scholarship Fund, which let him focus on landscapes. McGrew lived for 17 years in New Mexico and from 1978 until 1986 in Cottonwood, Arizona. For more than 30 years, McGrew traveled the back roads of the Hopi and Navajo reservations, to which he was introduced in the mid-1950s by the Western artist Jimmy Swinnerton. "The effect was somewhat like what must have happened when Degas saw his first ballet dancer," one biographer wrote.
