The Grand View is well positioned to serve the needs of an American Public Television audience who continues to demand quality, innovation, and imagination in their television choices and wants television that touches hearts and stirs their own creative instincts. Baumann says, "While art alone cannot change the world, The Grand View hopes that its unique artistic perspective can add sensibility to the important issues that face America's National Parks."

The Grand View

Imagine hiking into Yosemite National Park with three guides. You reach the famed vista that offers a view of Half Dome and your breath is taken away by its beauty. Your guides watch as your reactions course through your body, and they remember their first experience of the vision. Now imagine those three guides, John Muir, Frederick Church, and Thomas Moran, all gathered together to bring you here to experience this vision and guide your hand and mind as you lift a brush to commit this vision to canvas. This is The Grand View. World renowned artist, Stefan Baumann, in conjunction with The Grand View, has produced the first 10 episodes of an on-going series on the wonder of creating in the wilderness. The series showcases the art, insights, and personal experiences of Baumann as he ventures into the wilderness of America's National parks. Each episode is a personal invitation to the audience to join Baumann on his intimate and vigorous journeys into parks such as Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone. Each week's episode will take the audience to one of over 360 parks within the American National Park network.

 

Visual Style

The series is a high energy travel show that takes the audience out of the studio and into the wide open spaces of our National Park System. Our guide, Stefan Baumann, will be backpacking into location, and the audience will follow as he applies his color theory, experience and vision to the practice of creating in nature. Each episode has a different theme. Every aspect of the production mix (sound and image) will be assembled to build the energy of each episode inspiring the audience to get out and take part in nature. The roar of Vernal Falls will be accompanied by high energy contemporary compositions while more cerebral settings will be married with the works of a gentler timbre creating a symbiotic relationship of sight and sound. The show's main purposes are to reveal the practice of painting in nature and to motivate the audience to experience a creative world outside of the studio.

Structure

During each excursion, the audience witnesses and learns the history and folklore of each park's unique wilderness. After Baumann selects a vista unique for the episode, he then makes an educational transition with a brief demonstration on the principles of landscape painting while focusing on composition, color and technique. Each journey and lesson reveals Baumann’s philosophy behind his vision, his reverence for all things within nature, and the magic behind his artistry. The contents of each episode are a union of styles: This Old House, Wild America, and Martha Stewart’s Living, fused to create a unique hybrid of entertainment and programming. This is The Grand View.

Transcripts

Study the highlights of Baumann's journeys in the detailed transcripts of
each show

• Yellow Stone National Park
• Kings Canyon Nat. Park
• Lava Beds Nat. Monument
•Channel Islands Nat. Park
• Lassen Volcanic Nat. Park
• Yosemite National Park
• Crater Lake National Park
• Death Valley National Park
• Pinnacles Nat. Monument
• Sequoia National Park

Public Television
Road trips

The National Park journeys of Baumann are, chronicled in high energy, 60 to 180 second segments. Each Roadtrip highlights the historical and physical details of these magnificent regions.

Personal Appearances

Episodes of The Grand View