The following is excerpted from LDS Living. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Dan Wilson was working on the project of a lifetime: a massive 12-by-8-foot painting of Jesus descending from heaven in a cloud of majesty, flanked by more than 300 white-clad angels announcing the Second Coming with voice and trumpet.
The clouds had given him more trouble than they should have—in one corner the paint kept drying into a muddy brown instead of white, despite days of painting and repainting. “You’d think that the clouds would have been the easiest part!” Wilson recalls. Thankfully, after a desperate prayer for help, the clouds had finally come out properly—milky and featherlike.
The painting had been commissioned to hang in the Washington D.C. Temple—one of the Church’s largest—after major renovations were completed, so for Wilson the stakes felt sky high.
But the piece was now coming together as he brushed the final touches onto Jesus’s robes, using vivid cadmium red and orange to add highlights where the sun shone through the crimson fabric. Setting down his brush, he left his studio for a quick lunch and forgot to lock the door behind him.
When he returned, Wilson heard tiny voices giggling in his studio. Rushing in, he found his 3-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter gleefully stroking cadmium red and orange onto the painting. “They were like, ‘This is fine,’” Wilson recalls. “‘Dad does it. Why can’t I? I’m just helping him out!’”
The toddlers were too short to reach most of the canvas, but their unwelcome additions were right on the low clouds that Wilson had finally perfected with great effort.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
