This work is part of a larger, decade and on-going narrative work My American Dream which I have been creating since 9-11.

The Grand Canyon at Sunrise concentrates on this great park and therefore nature in general, in context speaking through the narrative allegory to bring symbolic meaning to the works in our perilous times.

Grand Canyon at Sunrise, is part of a larger body of work regarding this great American national park, and painted from my own photo from one of several trips I took there with my husband Andrew Madrid, I hope to depict the sublime aspect of feeling a small part of a big thing when regarding the immensity of nature, the famous El Tovar hotel standing in for humanity.

Like the transcendentalist belief of we are part of nature and all of nature is alive, I’m hoping to build on the American landscape tradition, but painted with exactitude, like the Hudson River School, to depict micromanaged aspects as realistic as possible. However, I’m also hopefully allowing, like the school of American Modernism (that regarded nature with allowing one’s own subjective outlook bring to new life an abstraction of reality from what one sees) to form an aesthetic work that goes beyond reality to a more synaesthetic and spiritual realm.

As in Japanese screens and poetry throughout the world, Spring stands for renewal, hope, and growth. This picture was taken on a journey with my husband and family, on a trip moving West to California to live and teach at USC after two decades in New York City.