Painted in 1985
“The Oakland Temple is quite meaningful to me as I was a young boy growing up in the San Francisco Bay area in a little town called Walnut Creek just outside of Oakland. Oakland was our stake center so we went from Walnut Creek through the Caldecott tunnel and into the San Francisco Bay area for our stake conferences or anything that was happening.”
“When I went about doing this painting, I actually did it for my father, but I did it for me in the sense that I wanted the weather and setting to be just like I remembered that area always being. So I didn’t choose a sunny bright day like you would think I would have chosen. I chose a semi-foggy day just as the fog was lifting.”
“Now the reason why was because as we were driving from the Walnut Creek side into the San Francisco Bay area as a youth the Walnut Creek side could be over 100 degrees, then you would drive through the tunnel and the San Francisco side it could be very cold and completely foggy. We had this game that we would play on who would guess what the temperature and what the day was going to be like on the other side of the tunnel. I would always choose foggy and I was usually the winner of that game. And that’s why I portrayed it the way I did, mostly because I always thought it was so beautiful looking out across San Francisco as the fog was lifting and the light coming and the light being really strong on the Oakland Temple itself. And that’s why I portrayed it in this manner.”
“What’s fun about this painting, for me, is that I painted it 34 years ago, but with the rededication of the temple recently it’s brought back so many fond memories of my childhood growing up in that area. I can remember collecting pennies to build the Oakland Temple. Back then everybody had to contribute to the paying of the building of everything, so I helped build it even as a primary child.”
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