21 November, 2018

For the first time in a very long time, something from the archives!


Monday, July 2, 2007, Glasgow, Scotland: [After class] we all go down to The Lighthouse, also known as Scotland's Centre for Design and Industry. It's a very impressive C. R. Mackintosh-designed building. It’s a bit between  exhibits, but our excursion still turned out really well.

We start out with a climb up a very high spiral staircase to the roof, with a featured view. That’s not exactly what Glasgow’s good at, but the way up was cool. Sarah really liked it. We look at stuff. On the third floor they have a superb thing. They’ve got tons of plasticine out for people to shape and fashion into whatever they want. Spence jumps right in, and Sarah jumps in right after. Drew, who has always backed into things, backs into it. I am a bit stumped. I need help!  Sarah, I don’t remember how to do stuff like this. I don’t even know where to start. She looks at me, in a way I’m not quite sure how to interpret. Just do it,' she says, and turns back to her work.

Well. I try a landscape, actually, with frames, and an escarpment there in the front, and two trees and three bushes, and a sloping horizon in the background. Spence does Moomintroll. It is agonizing for him to leave his work in the room, where all the other participants have left their work, and which is after all the whole, cool point of the thing. Drew’s work is entitled My abstract excursion. It looks kind of like a gang of violent pretzels exploding out of a wooden crate. It’s quite good, and witty. She puts it way in the back, behind everything.

Sarah has an artist’s sensibility, and an artist’s facility. She has been a bit distant, occasionally even forbidding during our stay so far, but now she leans in with interest, even friendly pleasure, and she works. She makes a stylized, faceless, featureless, long-limbed eastern European man, sitting pacifically on a stool. She calls it anonymous.It’s kind of chilling actually. After finishing her work Sarah looks happy. 

We go to the gift shop too, and have a really good time. The girls spend a good deal of time looking at design and furniture books. I notice, or fancy, that the kids are thinking of possible, or rather of impossible purchases in the light of the things that we’ve seen, and the principles that we're trying to whisper into their ears when we do things like this. Drew has us come and look at a flip book that features a Russian dancer turning in circles with his leg stretched high up and out, and a child who tries to slip by and gets kicked in the head and completely wiped out as he does so. We laugh. We also, finally, spend too much money on a delightfully designed plush toy for the dear Claire. It's her birthday this week, and we'll miss it! We'll miss her, too, a lot. (We already do!) Actually, as far ast that money goes, days will pass, we’ll easily make our budget, and we’ll be glad we spent it. 

We go home, happy.

Here's a picture of the aforementioned plush toy, which is currently being exhibited in the Bishop's office of the LDS Kolob 2nd ward, located at 840 South, 400 East, Springville, Utah, USA.

Everyone, it's Dave!