Andrew and I love the Grand Canyon, and the truly sublime, overwhelming feeling you experience when you are on the South Rim, looking out at “God’s Cathedral,” seemingly collapsing all time and space into the vastness and greatness of nature and the earth. When we first went there, and I took this image the painting is based on (indeed, we went there to get this shot!) it was an explosive blizzard, where we drove in our James Dean Porsche, just purchased with summer tires, on a road that was barely visible, with trucks literally rolling over and sliding to all sides of us. When we arrived, it seemed like Heaven—really a miracle that we made it there alive with the car intact, and other visitors greeting us with such beaming, celestial smiles that we felt that we had been transported into another realm of beatific consciousness. I would always describe the Kantian sense of the sublime to students with the example of standing in front of the canyon, thinking about how long it took to forge vs. how short our own lives are, and the grandiosity of the view overwhelming experience and knowledge to send one in ecstatic reveries of the objectification of the self in the world of nature and time, a truly sublime experience one would never forget. And of course, it was true when we were standing there, contemplating our place and time in the Universe.

I love Ansel Adams, among the many (I grew up looking at Bierstadt and many other artists, paintings of mountains and the West, growing up in Colorado and going to the Denver Art Museum) artist depicting nature but specifically the National Parks, in order to bring about awareness of them to cultivate the need and desire to keep these lands free of human greed and industry, and, even painting this just before Trump, felt the real need to make works (the old master used to say, if you want to do something new, follow nature!) of our real world of nature, not just for myself, but to bring awareness contemporaneously of the importance of keeping the sanctity of these experiences intact. I also painted this, without being aware at first, of the Centennial celebration of the National Parks.

But this also was a tumultuous time in my own life—I just had accepted a full professor teaching job at USC with tenure for the rest of my life, and this was the last large painting I created in my NYC Chelsea studio, thinking about our lives and future, using the image as a meditation (hopefully in micromanaged moments the realness of the Canyon breaks into unconscious abstraction, à la Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings!) to contemplate this new chapter, with our lives completely changing at this stage of our mid lives and careers, thinking of grandiosity of time and the world, and our small, but hopefully at least personally significant, place within the Universe.