Great Painters of the Grand Canyon

In all the known universe there is but one Grand Canyon. It lies wholly in the northern part of Arizona. It is the most wonderful geological record of creation, the most spectacular phenomenon known to mankind, and truly justifies the name bestowed upon it -The Grand Canyon - most sublime of gorges; titan of chasms.

It stuns the eye. The scale is so immense it appears too large, too strange to be real. It is, as a geo-biological entity, the most revealing single volume of earth's history anywhere on the face of the planet. It is a perfect setting to prove that a picture is worth a thousand words. text continued on page 33 Gunnar Widforss (1879-1934) fell in love with the American West. He is world renowned for the quality and expression of his watercolors. He became the unsurpassed master of the Grand Canyon in his field, painting expansive panoramas as well as intimate, colorful studies of the flora and fauna. He was a quiet man and, since he painted basically for the love of his subject rather than for money, his art has only recently become known in the national marketplace. Grand Canyon Panorama. Watercolor on special paper board, 21% x 43½ inches. Courtesy Katherine H. Haley Collection.

Wilson Hurley was born in 1924 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His careers as a lawyer, banker, engineer, and military pilot served to postpone his becoming a landscape artist of premier renown. His work is distinguished for its beauty of form, light, and order. He has been accorded many honors including the Silver Medal for Oil, in 1973, and the Gold Medal for Oil, in 1977, at the National Academy of Western Art. Late one fall afternoon, Hurley stood on the North Rim, watched the canyon well up with shadows, saw the San Francisco Peaks, 70 miles away, glow in the sunlight, and recorded this quiet sunset. Bright Angel Point. Oil on canvas, 64 x 108 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Clark Hulings is acclaimed internationally as one of the most honored living painters. Born in 1922, he has literally "painted around the world" in a style that is distinguished by his understanding of light, textures, and expression of feeling. He has created several Grand Canyon masterworks, including the National Academy of Western Art Grand Award - Prix de West-winner in 1973. (Arizona Highways, December, 1973). The painting shown here, Grand Canyon, Bright Angel Trail, is his sixth Canyon portrayal. Oil on canvas, 24 x 40 inches. Courtesy James S. Fowler Collection. text continued from page 29 Millions of people have written billions of words, exposed countless frames of film and painted perhaps a hundred thousand pictures . . . but the canyon remains strangely indescribable.

William Henry Van Roon wrote: "Man, even in his proudest moments, is a puny and helpless creature when he compares himself to the gods. For the gods speak to him through creation. Man tries to answer, he tries to vindicate himself, that vindication - is really what we call art."

The gods of the Grand Canyon arch their eyebrows and smile kindly on modern man's attempt to explain this phenomenon of creation. The great chasm yawns, the Colorado River flows endlessly downstream, and neither is affected to the slightest degree by the profusion of emotions that stir the soul of man when first he confronts this wonder of the world.

Nevertheless, a few mortals have succeeded, to varying degrees of human greatness, in expressing their emotions through art - writers, photographers, musicians, painters.

Our selection of great paintings represents the efforts of artists endowed with a vast amount of talent and blessed with highly attuned sensory systems. They are great artists.

The Grand Canyon is a great subject. Michelangelo was truly one of the great artists of all time. And indeed, he painted "ideas" rather than "phenomena," but the difference between an artist's impressions and expressions during the Renaissance were considerably different than those of artists today.

Let us, just for fun, fantasize a moment and try to visualize the world's largest fresco . . . painted by Michelangelo, commissioned by the Pope of his time. There would be hundreds of angels, saints, cherubim and seraphim exploding in and out of clouds and celestial gazebos, floating heavenward over the rims of the Grand Canyon, with the Devil and hordes of the damned cast into the boiling water rapids below. Wow!

But the time was not yet right for Michelangelo, and many other great painters to portray the Grand Canyon. The task of capturing this planet's one indescribable work of nature began with artists of the 19th century.

Hundreds of painters have tried to express their emotions about the Grand Canyon, as it was, is, and always will be. Many were good painters. Some were good artists. But a mere few will always merit the respect and rewards due those individuals endowed with above-average amounts of greatness called genius.

We may see and study the art of the painter. But in order to achieve a memorable work, the artist has to "experience" the Grand Canyon. Every sense has to be keenly alert and ready for that certain propitious moment, for once gone it would never again return. The gods of the Grand Canyon decided to stage just such a super-spectacular natural effects production one hot afternoon in mid-August, 1873, mainly for the benefit and amazement of artist Thomas Moran, explorer John Wesley Powell, and a small corps of topographers, photographers, writers, and Indian workers. Thomas Moran, with Powell's help, was seeking a viewpoint from which he could sketch, for later projection to a large canvas, the panorama of the Grand Canyon. In its final form, the giant painting was to be used by Major Powell when he appeared before Congress asking for funds to continue his expeditions.

They found the "perfect" site on a protruding plateau-like formation of the lofty Kaibab Mountain. Moran was wiping his brow when he heard a clap of thunder . . . and turning he saw a thunderhead boiling up from the depths of the chasm. Dazzling flashes of bluepurple lightning bounced from cloud to crag and ran down the buttes like rim-lighted rivulets. Ear-splitting peals of thunder followed, and curtains of rain dropped across the gorge.

J. E. Colburn, writer for Picturesque America said: "A thousand streams gathered on the surrounding plains and dashed down into the depths of the canyon in waterfalls many times the height of Niagara."

Thomas Moran knew the gods were talking to him, and he answered them in a language they understood. "In my way too, I am something of a creator. I cannot, of course, do what you do, for you can do everything, but I am an artist and with a few pigments, some oil, a piece of canvas and some old brushes will try to create a masterpiece."

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By the early 1900s, Thomas Moran's work had become so valuable that several fakes appeared. Aware of the fraud, he began to include his thumbprint with his signature. (Lower right corner of painting at right.) In his later years, Moran made a trip to the Grand Canyon with a party of fellow artists including Elliot Daingerfield and Edward Potthast. It was a time when the Canyon was at its "showtime" best. During 10 rewarding days, storms filled the abyss with clouds. The artists painted with enthusiasm, and Moran felt impelled to record the Grand Canyon in Mist (right). Oil on canvas, 14 x 20 inches (detail far right is almost actual size). Courtesy Gerald P. Peters Collection.

Swedish-born Gunnar Widforss is buried at the place he most loved, the Grand Canyon. A Kaibab limestone boulder marks his grave among the pines in the small cemetery. On a bronze plaque are these lines by Robert Browning: "Bury this man there? Here, here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, lightnings are loosened, stars come and go, lofty designs must close in like effects loftily lying, leave him still loftier than the world suspects, living and dying." Untitled study. Watercolor, 24 x 30 inches. Courtesy Sherman Hazeltine Collection.

William R. Leigh (1866-1955) was a contemporary of Remington and Russell, but long outlived both of them. For nearly 50 years Western vistas, Indians, and cowboys flowed from his brush with a vitality which reflected his love of the Old West. From Impressions of an Artist While Camping in the Grand Canyon, Arizona, we can learn of his experience. "On either side of my ten-foot-wide perch and in front, the eye drops into chasms, two, three, and four thousand feet deep... The fierce light dazzles... Oh, for a breeze. There is a torpor, a spell upon the atmosphere ... Suddenly the peak I have been painting is plunged in shadow... A low rumble explains the reason. The vanguards of a storm are hurrying up the sky... and now the spell is broken." The Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Oil on canvas, 37 x 61 inches. Courtesy James S. Fowler Collection.

text continued from page 33 Thomas Moran had experienced the miracle he needed. Having experienced the savage fury of a storm in the Grand Canyon he could now portray the almighty power and compelling sublimity of the chasm.

In October, 1873, Moran began the 7 foot by 9 foot painting of the chasm. When Powell visited him on Thanksgiving, he had barely sketched in the charcoal plan. But Powell's imagination saw beyond the charcoal, and he praised Moran, who immediately attacked the huge canvas with renewed vigor.

Moran wrote: "It has progressed wonderfully and promises all that I could desire of it. I have got the storm in good."

Moran's painting was developing into more than a visual image of the chasm itself. It was the whole country through which the river had cut its way. The distance represented was spectacularly immense, with a clear visual range across an expanse of more than 120 miles.

Were all that there is in that space depicted, the result would be pure chaos. But Moran, boldly and brilliantly, simplified details to a masterful standard of austere minimalism while maintaining basic harmony that is a testimony to his genius. Instead of literActually interpreting the scene, Moran conveyed a feeling of truth with a touch of romance and believable fantasy. Although the critics of his day regarded the artist and his work with great respect, they advanced barrages of academic reservations. Moran survived them all, however, and realized his triumph when, in 1874, Congress appropriated $10,000 for the purchase of the painting to hang in the Senate lobby along with his painting, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Were it possible to bid on The Chasm of the Colorado in an art auction, one would not be a fool to assume that it would command in excess of $5 million.

Moran's view of the Grand Canyon, and the West in general, attracted the promoters of the Santa Fe Railroad, thus began a period when sponsors sent artists to paint the Grand Canyon, Indians, life in the West, and later on much of Arizona and New Mexico. But the worldwide exposure was almost completely established because of Major John Wesley Powell, Thomas Moran, and the efforts of W. R. Leigh, and railroad officials.

In addition to Thomas Moran, our selection of fine artists who found their heart's delight in the Grand Canyon includes W. R. Leigh, a contemporary of Moran, foreign-born Carl Oscar Borg and Gunner Widforss, and contemporary masters Clark Hulings and Wilson Hurley. Among the most recent interpreters, young Arizona artist-teacher Merrill Mahaffey's work on the Grand Canyon also shows major promise for incorporation into future exploration in these pages.