Life is Like Art in the Grand Canyon

What I learned from trying (and failing) to draw the Grand Canyon

“Stunned, it’s depth and scale jarring, a wide expanse both filled with so much when you look closely and empty when you just take a glance. Those who see the Grand Canyon say it’s impossible to capture its majesty with a photograph, yet even in person, it looks pixel perfect. No formation the same shape, it feels surreal mocking all the natural laws of physics and with so many shades of red and yellow it seems undeniable it must have been created as a spectacle, to be viewed and admired and awed.” 

- Anant Agrawal  

Now I could tell you that seeing the Grand Canyon helped me realize how small I am in the grand scheme of things and about what a sublime and life changing experience it was, but unfortunately even after staring at the vast expanse for hours, I feel … completely the same. All the reasons it should take my breath away stare me right in the face, but I’m still the same old me, breathing the same old way I always do. Luckily, I knew this was coming. Ever since I’ve been a kid, I’ve never been able to truly appreciate the beauty of nature. 

I’ve enjoyed the solitude and the fresh air, the warm sun, but never have I looked out at a great view and really felt much. I’ve known others, people who say staring out onto the hills and lakes fills them up in a way that makes them feel they need nothing else. People have reported certain views have brought them to tears. To me, it’s a cool few minutes, a great many photos taken to show off to those who truly appreciate the scenery, and then a loss of interest and boredom. 

But recently I watched an anime called Blue Period about art and in it, a boy gifts his mothers a portrait of her he’s drawn. Honestly, it isn’t that good and not too special to look at, but the boy explains how while drawing the portrait, he noticed so much more about his mom, how her hands had little cuts from cooking, how pretty she looked in the same worn dress she wore over and over again, how she braided up her hair so it was easier to see and do the chores. In the show, it brought the mom to tears and honestly, it brought me to tears too.

To me the premise of this scene is that it’s not just the end result of the art that is powerful, but the attention and focus you give to your subject through the process that is also powerful. So this gave me an idea, Maybe art was the antidote to my apathy? Maybe this be what helped me truly appreciate at least the view of the Grand Canyon: one of the world's greatest natural wonders.

So I took on the challenge on drawing what I saw at the Grand Canyon in hopes it might help me appreciate it more and after two or three attempts at this I realized, it just wasn’t working for me. I didn't end up having a much stronger emotional reaction, but as I started putting the pieces together on how to draw, I did feel like I was putting together some of the puzzle pieces of life. That’s what I want to write down and share with you all today, what I learned about art, and what it taught me about life: 

Focus on the Big Picture

Life can seem like looking at the Grand Canyon. An incredibly bright buffet with an infinite amount of views to take in and places where you want to take a closer look. When armed with a camera, it can seem simple to just take a panorama video and boom, you’ve captured everything you can see from one spot all at once. But in life it isn’t so easy to take it all in. Life is more like that tiny eight and a half by eleven piece of paper where you can greedily grab as much as you can fit and it will still only be a small sliver of what you can see yourself having. So you have to choose something smaller to focus on first and the rest of the picture will start filling itself in from there. You need that reference point, you can’t do everything at once, and getting it wrong makes everything down the line increasingly difficult.  

For example, I wanted to draw this beautiful peak. I decided the best place to start was to go left to right on my piece of paper, so I started with drawing the leftmost peak. But then what I wanted to be the centerpiece of my drawing wasn’t actually in the center. The image I had in my head was awkwardly cut off. Just like in the drawing, in life things aren’t going to work out perfectly as you expect. You have to start with the right centerpiece, get that in the right place first and if you get that right, everything else will better shape itself around it. 

You Erase More Than You Draw

This was one of the most frustrating parts of drawing that I didn’t foresee. I’d be happily sketching along and when I take a step back and it looks nothing like what I was picturing.  Even the line differentiating the sky from the ground was somehow wrong. But drawing that line over and over again, due to the amount of variation, at some point, it would be perfect and once it was perfect, building off of it was way easier. In the end, it would take me forever to make something that looked right, but not because the individual time it took me to create the picture the right way, but the endless iteration and adjusting and erasing of the ways I had done it wrong. 

I know it may sound ridiculous as I’m still “young”, but sometimes I have wondered how much I’ve trapped myself in what I do. It’s all I’ve ever known how to do. Would I ever really be able to erase and start again? Won’t I lose the huge head start others may have who have spent a ton of time doing what I’ll suddenly be new at? But with drawing it isn’t like that. Drawing isn’t create then add add add, it’s create, delete but start different, create delete but start different. Every time you erase it may seem like you are just returning back to that blank paper you were staring at a minute ago, but in fact you are building idea of where exactly you want to build from and that makes the rest so much easier.

Sometimes science is more art than science

I knew making surreal pictures bending gravity was hard, but I was drawing inanimate rocks. How hard could it be? All I had to do was put what I saw down on paper. If I see a circle, I draw a circle, and then eventually what I see will just be down on paper. That is what I thought, but boy that was a naive way to think. I tried drawing the layers of the rock, or how the clouds leave a shadow on the rocks just by copying what I was seeing and it just didn’t turn out right at all.

Frustrated and close to giving up, I decided to cheat and see how other people drew the Grand Canyon and tried to capture these effects. And I was shocked! They completely cheated too. They would completely ignore certain details, or use an art tactic to capture an oversimplified way of light hitting the Canyon that wasn’t really accurate if you looked close and compared what you saw to the picture side by side, but it somehow looked just right at a glance. The brain took it in and made it feel real and as I clung tight to reality in my drawing it looked like a cheap trick. 

I’m not sure about the best way to describe it, but to me it was kind of like if you want to describe a mule to someone you could try to patiently maximize the truth and say it's a small mammal, it has 4 legs, 2 ears, 2 eyes, etc… or say it looks like a tiny horse with big ears. Now the second description isn’t exactly right, but somehow you just get a much clearer picture of what a mule is with this description, it feels like you are speaking the brain's language. 

For me, this could translate into a big lesson about life. Sometimes the unintuitive short cuts may not exactly achieve what can be done with meticulous effort, but somehow it still gets the job done in a better way and this is what comes with experience and expertise. I could have tried to capture the lighting just by eyeballing it forever, but only an expert who understands light and art could show me the technique to capture it with pencil. Even with something as seemingly simple as just putting down what you see on paper, you can’t just tackle it head on all the time. Sometimes it takes a little rule-bending to show the most understandable version of the truth. 

Parting Thoughts

In summary, I really enjoyed my trip and experimenting with art and drawing. I didn’t get the breath-taking appreciation for nature I was hoping for, but I did get something unexpected and really valuable: a new lens of looking at the world. I can’t wait to try more completely different things that force me to think in new ways and with different approaches. Hope you enjoyed the read!