Seeing beyond the Grand Canyon
Bruce Aiken is an artist with only one subject. He paints the Grand Canyon over and over and has for more than 30 years.
Bruce Aiken is an artist with only one subject. He paints the Grand Canyon over and over and has for more than 30 years.
The sheer rock walls cut by the blue-green waters of the Colorado River are his lone muse, his love, his obsession. "She's the model. She runs my life," he says. The Grand Canyon is a siren that enticed the 54-year-old Aiken to drop out of art school in New York City at age 19.
"The Grand Canyon is such a big part of me. How do you leave your muse? I feel like the canyon controls me sometimes," he says.
In the beginning, Aiken was so intimidated by the canyon that he could only tentatively sketch it in a notebook as he analyzed the rock layers and botany of his model. After three years of studying, he worked up the courage to begin painting the Grand Canyon. He never stopped.
Today, his panoramic oil paintings, which range up to 6 feet-by-9 feet in size, sell for up to $45,000 and he has a line of waiting commission work, mostly for private collectors who are equally taken by the natural wonder.
Commercial success has surprised Aiken, who arrived in Arizona in 1970 with $18, a paint box and few ambitions beyond a desire to live near something beautiful.
He was raised in New York by a mother who was an artist and a father, an actor. He had visited the Grand Canyon as a child, but by the time he reached college, the stunning scene had faded into something he thought he'd only imagined.
He saw the canyon again after his first year at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and he was totally taken. He hitchhiked west in 1970, landing in Phoenix to live with supportive grandparents and cousins, who figured him for the "wild, crazy hippie cousin from New York," he says.
He spent about a year taking community college classes, where he met and began to woo Mary Shields, a nursing student he persuaded to share a motorcycle ride and eventually marriage.
Then, in early 1972, he rode his motorcycle to the South Rim and decided he wasn't leaving. "I felt like I had arrived at the ultimate destination," he says.
But the only people allowed to live in the park were employees, so Aiken got a job with the National Park Service.
Mary Aiken, a shy woman who grew up on the Pacific coast in Seattle, had figured she would end up living near the ocean. However, Roaring Springs gave her the same sensation, so she and the couple's then 9-month-old daughter, Mercy, went with Bruce Aiken to the canyon floor and stayed.
The Aikens had two more children and still could not bring themselves to leave. So, they home schooled and raised their children below the North Rim as long as they could.
"The environment lends itself to camaraderie," says their daughter, Shirley Aiken, now 30. Shirley, an artist in Tucson, remembers how her father laboured over painting after painting earlier in his career.
For a while, he did 12 to 15 canyon paintings a year, sometimes working on two or three easels at a time. These days, he works at a slower pace.
His best known works are blue-hued panoramas, some from rim vantages and others from river level. Blue, he insists, is the main color of the canyon despite its red rocks.
What compels him, draws him in, is the "absolutely pulsating life vibe" of the canyon, he says, waving his arms as he leans against a guard rail at the rim. "It's dynamic at every single level."
"My relationship with the canyon is like a marriage: The longer you're with her, the more you know her."