OIl Painting by Steve Alpert
PAINTING IN MY BIRTHDAY SUIT. April 1981. Packed up the oils and French easel and hopped a flight to Phoenix. Back then it was easy to book a room at the South Rim lodge. Inexpensive, too. That was then. Day One — a 6,000 ft. hike down Bright Angel trail to the lowest mesa, 1,000 ft. above the Colorado, running blood red as always. The ancient torrent carrying red silt down river through the ages in the grandest of the grand, the Grand Canyon. If you’ve never been there, listen to Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite.
Summer of ‘72, I was hitchhiking my way across the southwest, across to LA and all the way up 101 to Vancouver, BC, with a ten day visit to my main destination, the Grand Canyon. It was there at the South Rim, I realized I was an artist. I didn’t choose it, it chose me. The electrical storm after dusk did it. Warm updrafts ruffled shoulder-length hippie hair. The moon was high, endless deep purple skies featured twinkling stars and whatever else lay above. From the west a blanket of dark clouds enveloped the horizon bringing flashes of heat lightening. Like someone closed the dome. Stars were swallowed up and the grandest of light shows commenced.
The wind picked up, swirling real strong, dust devils all around, deafening shusshing from the bushes, intoxicating odor of sage and creasote. Shadows of the great canyons lit up here and there in blacks and grays spread over the grand canvas before me. It was 3-D, Dude!! I became small and insignificant as a speck of dust. Cares and worries vaporized. A perfect moment and an epiphany — the love of nature could save my sanity throughout my life, could hold me together as an integrated individual able to withstand the calamaties of life, big and small. I would tell this story over and over again in my art-making.
Back to 1981, Day Two. After breakfast, car packed, drove east along the rim road. Parked off the shoulder, hauled the gear through the pines, that dry piney smell. Found myself atop a wide open mesa, surrounded by seemingly infinite space, a deep blue dome of blue above, white contrails of trans-continental flights scraped across like chalk. Marble Canyon shimmering in the north, and Lake Powell, a blur of blue far, far away. It was just me and this incomprehensible landscape in rhapsodic silence. Squeezed colors onto palette while my brain was trying to make sense of impossibly endless patterns of ever-changing shapes and shadows beyond. After a few hours I broke out lunch. Nobody around. What the hell! Ripped off the clothes. A brilliant blue shrike darted nearby wearing more than me. Hours of mad, passionate painting ensued. Furiously brushing color to canvas — reds, ochres, vermillion — bathed in high desert light. The only people who bore witness sipped Sprite at 35,000 ft.
My love affair with this sacred place grew. A few years later, a raft trip down the Colorado through The Grand Canyon for five glorious days, 120 miles down river with a guide we later learned was pulling vodka from his canteen, not water. It was his 149th trip, and was a steely (drunk) and superb navigator. Going down river was hypnotic. Never wanted it to end.
I’ve made dozens of canyon images over the years, it thrives in my blood coursing through heart and soul. GO THERE! If you are not able to go the Grand Canyon, you can experience this same feeling in your own backyard, in a park, the woods, away from civilization such as it is. For me, this love affair and wonder continues and is one of the few things I can always count on wherever I am.
How does nature give you this great feeling of serenity? Do you pass it on in your work?
