Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Salt Lake City

I happened to be in Salt Lake City for a conference and found myself surrounded by streaming crowds of Mormons who were also there for "Conference." The Temple area is beautiful.

I did this sketch just inside the gate to the garden, just south of the Temple. There are several graceful old plane trees there, and the sight of the sunlit building through their branches is what made me stop and spend an hour.

In other settings I would have people of all ages and backgrounds looking over my shoulder and commenting, but here only children struck up conversations with me. Parents sometimes joined in after their children started it, but even then, the parents did not encourage the conversations, or add anything to them. It gave me a polite taste of what it feels like to be an outsider - something I'm not used to.

Click for much larger image. This is 9 x 12, done in pencil, then inked with prismacolor pens (which don't run when wet) and other pens (which do run when wet) and watercolor crayons. Water was added with a Niji water brush. Then the pencil was all erased. The Temple has windows all the way to the ground, but I felt the incomplete lower section of the sketch made the building seem taller - which it certainly is.

2 comments:

L'Adelaide said...

yep...that sounds about right tho I do know why and it's more about trying to maintain a "sense of the spiritual" from conference than trying to be snobbish. what they do not get is it happens anyway....unfortunate...

you did a beautiful job on the temple :)

susan said...

It also makes it look much more like a castle in a fairytale. Very pretty and very well done.