Arts to Zion

How to make our St. George weekend distinctive and memorable, after owning a house in St. George and seeing the sights there for 15 years?  We spent Saturday, January 14, 2017, visiting many of the 50 arts galleries in Southern Utah that took part in the Arts to Zion event.  The galleries invited their artists to paint in the galleries and talk to the visitors who roamed through.

First stop was a gallery on Main Street in St. George that specialized in water colors. Most of the paintings, throughout the tour, were of landscapes.  Southern Utah is so beautiful that landscape painting has flourished as an art form.

 We particularly enjoyed the Mission Gallery, on Ancestor Square.

 This artist was as distinctive-looking as his paintings.

This man took a break from his painting to tell us how he had quit a profitable automobile accessory business to paint fulltime.  He travels throughout the country, participating in plein air painting events, in which artists paint pictures outside, over a weekend, and compete for prizes.  The Impressionists scandalized the French art establishment by their plein air painting.

There were sculptures around the galleries, and picturesque brushes, easels, and boxes of paint, waiting for their owners to take them up again.

We met Simon Winegar at the Authentique Gallery.  He was a young man from Northern Utah, whose paintings of antique barns and houses were icons of traditional, rural Utah.

 Simon told us how he often painted outside.

Roland Lee is one of the best-known landscape artists from Southern Utah.  He spends much of his time outdoors, finding scenes to paint, then takes photographs or makes small paintings, and finishes his final work inside his studio.

We stopped by the DeFiore Center, on the brow of a hill looking over St. George.  The house was built in the 1950s by a wealthy lawyer/politician whose wife taught music at Dixie College.  Dave and I mused over how elegant the home must have seemed for its time, and the fancy parties that were held in its spacious backyard, overlooking the city.

 We drove on to Springdale, to visit the five galleries participating in Arts to Zion.

 Our favorite visit was to the LaFave Gallery, which we had never before entered.  Kate Starling, one of the prominent Southern Utah landscape artists, was at her easel.  I talked with her about her background (geologist) and the influences on her work ("Maynard Dixon.  I start by looking for the basic structure and form of a scene, but then add in more detail than Maynard Dixon did.")

 After all that gallery-hopping, we treated ourselves to supper at Oscar's Cafe, with the specialties we love--sweet potato fries and green salad with dill dressing and roasted portobello mushrooms.

 Statues of Kokopelli and Zion's majestic mountains surrounded us.

 On our way home through Hurricane, we treated ourselves to a movie.

 We thoroughly enjoyed "Hidden Figures," which told of three African-American mathematicians who worked for NASA and helped put the American space missions into orbit.

 They grew to prominence through a group of NASA women "computers" who ran calculations by hand in the 1960s and then transitioned into becoming some of the earliest NASA computer programmers.

 We will return to St. George in two weeks.  How can we match this amazing weekend?

The People in Your Neighborhood

I've been humming an old song from the Mister Rogers TV show, "The People in Your Neighborhood".  During the weekends of January 7-8, 2017, and January 14-15, 2017, I thought a lot about our friends and helpers from the Upper Avenues.  Dave's and my favorite neighbors are, of course, Mike and Heidi, who live just down the hill on 5th Avenue and D Street.  They drop by to watch the JAZZ, try out one of their new board games with us, or share a glass of Red Barn apple cider.  Mike and Heidi joined us for Sunday dinner on January 8, and Heidi seemed particularly pleased to eat untainted roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy.  She is typically served all manner of exotica by both her husband and her in-laws!

Our new, innovative bishopric has divided ward members into four janitorial "teams."  Dave and I are on the "S to Z Team."  We clean the chapel on the first Saturday of every other month, beginning January 7.  Each team has a leader, and we were fortunate, indeed, to get Russ McSweeney.  He is an ultra-efficient, no-nonsense man who ordered his team around like a drill sergeant.  The result?  We were all done in 30 minutes.

On Saturday night, January 7, we hosted our college friends, Deanne and Bob Wilde, Spencer and Jane Jones, and Paul and Julie Emmer for dinner.  We talked and laughed all evening about old and new adventures.  The Wildes are just back from a mission in Ghana, the Joneses have served missions in Nigeria, Hong Kong, and Brazil, and the Emmers have made arrangements to work in the Copenhagen Temple, but are waiting, first, to see if the dates of any of their three single daughters turn into husbands.  The Wildes, Jones, and Emmers don't live near us at the moment, but we have known and loved them so long that we think of them as close friends and neighbors.

 When Lisa was a baby, the Joneses invited us for dinner, and we took Lisa along.  She spent the meal alternately crying and crawling under the table, as the childless Joneses tried to disguise their horror.  I doubt they would be so horrified now, after raising six children of their own!

Other honored and necessary people in our neighborhood are the repairmen who fix our drains, water heaters, and computers.  This gentleman from Comcast/Xfinity solved our sorrows by getting our computer up and running, after it crashed a few nights before.

We are delighted that young couples are moving into our ward.  The reason Heidi got served roast beef and mashed potatoes for Sunday dinner, rather than nasi goreng and gado gado, was that I had volunteered to take Sunday dinner to the Moyles, after the birth of their baby daughter.  I wasn't sure they'd enjoy the Indonesian specialties I had planned!

One of the pleasures of being an Emigration Fourth Ward member is the wedding showers hosted by ward ladies.  What could be finer than Pam Johnson's rolls, Karen Derrick's chicken and pesto salad, and Pam Cole's pecan bars?  The shower was a double delight because we celebrated the engagement of our neighbor, Eric Monson.  He was born weighing one pound--"The size of a pound of butter," as his mother, Nancy, told me at the time.  Eric was given a 5% chance of surviving.  "Somebody has to be in that 5%," Nancy, said, "and maybe it will be us."  I delivered a bouquet of helium balloons to the Monsons two months later, when Eric came home from the hospital.  He is a success story, and we are so happy for him to find someone to love.  Robin Kimball resumed her traditional role of interviewing the bride and groom about such essential knowledge for the ward ladies as when and where the new couple had their first kiss! Marilyn McSweeney always does the shower invitations and Robyn Petty always buys the group gift--we know our roles.

When Dave and I attended Church at the Coral Canyon Ward in St. George, on January 15, Dave asked me, "Don't those people on the stand look like the McCulloughs?"  They were, indeed, the McCulloughs, who now spend half their time in SLC and half in St. George, punctuated by weekends at their remote cabin in the Uintahs.  Lee joked that he feels safer in St. George than in SLC from bishops who are insistent on sending him on a mission.  "In St. George, the bishops deal with so many vacationing retired people that they're satisfied if you come to Church at all."  Lee told us that he took up running marathons at the age of 66, and since then has run 24 marathons.  He also remembered with pleasure his scouting days with Michael and Jonny.