So, today I went down to Salt Lake City with my HUM 497R class, basically it's a Senior Seminar class for the humanities. The drive from Rexburg there is about four hours long. We left at 6am, I woke up at 5am after about an hour sleep last night. We got to Salt Lake at about 10am and we went to the General conference Center, which was cool...And massively huge! We went through the whole thing and looked at all of the artwork they have there. I took lots of pictures. We were there for about an hour. The tour guide was kind of rude. She didn't want to let us stop and enjoy the art...She kept trying to rush us.
After that we went to the Church Museum, which was right across the street. Our teacher had arranged for us to be taken on a tour by a man he knew who worked there. Here comes the first mistake. The man, I don't remember his name...Let's call him "Sir Talks-A lot"...Took us off to the side and started talking about the different art techniques and what makes art unique to a certain religion or culture. For some reason he kept asking me all the questions. Some answers I knew, but some I just couldn't think of...I had no idea what answers he was looking for. After about the tenth question to me I finally said, "Why am I getting all the questions!?!"
Then he led us to a room upstairs filled with different art by LDS artists. I decided to stay in the back of the group and avoid eye contact from then on. Basically, he went to each painting and gave us a lecture about each one. We stayed in that one room, standing, for an hour. Then he took us downstairs to another sections with LDS art from different countries. Again, more lectures about each piece. At one point he told us to look closely at this pair of boots that were there...I guess we didn't get close enough because he kept pulling people towards the boots saying "look closer!!" We only got through half of this room and it took us an hour and a half. So, all together, we were standing listening to this guy talk for two and half hours straight. Most of us started to tune him and can't remember a thing he said after the first hour. My back and feet were killing me. It felt so good to sit down after that.
We went to Wendy's for lunch, our teacher paid. Then we got back in the car and drove to Springville, Utah...Which is about 45 min. to an hour away (with construction). We got there and we went to the studio of an artist. The artist's name was, I want to say, Benjamin McPherson. I'm not sure on the last name because only his first name is on his paintings. Anyways, he was the one who's painting was on the cover of Augustus Ensign. It was called, "And It Was Night." It is a very good painting. If you slowly dim the lights who can see the sky behind Christ turn from dusk into night and you see Judas fade into the background, while the faithful apostles stay lit until the last of the light is gone. It is very neat effect. He also talked about some of other work he has done; and showed us a painting that is currently working on.
He is working on more paintings of Christ and he is also working on children's book called, "Imajin" or something like that. It is about two kids that live in a black and white world and one day they see color for the first time and they decide to explore. They enter a weird world full of color and interesting creatures. Not only is Benjamin illustrating the book, but he also co-wrote it, and wrote a script for it if it ever gets turned into a film...Which someone wants to do.
Anyways, after that we went to the Springville museum, at 4pm. But at that point we were all exhausted and tired of museums, so we weren't really into it. We stayed there until 5pm, talked with the director a little bit, then got back in the vans and headed for Rexburg. We got back at 10:20pm. Long day and I'm tired! I have a lot of studying to do this weekend and I am not looking forward to it. So, I need to go to sleep now so I can wake up and get to work!
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