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Few things give me as much instant delight as running across a stack of old church magazines. Something about the printing and production and images chosen makes me so happy. (I feel this way about all old magazines, but, say, a New Era from the early 70s is particularly exciting because it’s utterly foreign from my personal experience yet so close to what I know. So close, yet . . . that’s not my life. Bumping into a letter to the editor from a missionary named Orson Scott Card? That experience for me is not the experience of a 15-year-old who first read it walking up from the mailbox forty years ago.
Anyway, reading the magazines online is nowhere near as cool. Besides the lack of anything to touch or smell, the older magazines have no images—it’s just reformatted text. (I’m referring here to the post-correlation magazines. If you go back further and look elsewhere, you can find that visual experience.
But I do occasionally look at old magazines online anyway. One nice recent find useful to AMLers might be this article regarding amateurism and Hugh Nibley. Or this one about a kid named Dean Millman.
Millman was a painter and so this lack of images is pretty annoying. Especially when the article ends with a chat about all the cool images they’ve printed.
I hadn’t heard of him, but he sounded like someone likely to succeed so I did some googling and found a gallery of thumbnails put up by family and a brief biography which made him all the more interesting (he rode a bike across the US at age 13!) and revealed that he was dead.
That he had died at age 27, actually. Of leukemia.
Man.
The teeny images I’d found didn’t satisfy, so I watched this:
This shows much more of his range and development. And makes me even sadder. I really love some of these images and his skill is apparent, but I also think that when he died he was heading down a rather boring and probably temporary sidetrack—and that he would have eventually arrived somewhere much more interesting (to me, at least). And who knows what he would have been doing in 2015.
As a Latter-day Saint artist I should of course be satisfied with Eternal Explanations, etc, etc, but I will admit to you here that I feel an awful sense of loss when an artist dies young. Maybe it’s selfishness that I don’t get to experience what that artist would have produced. Maybe it’s sadness that they had their mortal work torn out from underneath them. Maybe it’s simply that this loss makes concrete what’s lost whenever any young person died. I don’t know. Frankly, it’s not a pain I choose to analyse.
I want to be able to take my kids for a walk every day, to teach them and have them grow up with nature. This is one great opportunity an artist has. I can stay away from this fast-moving, suicidal society. I guess my main goal in life is to really be a good Christian and do good Christian work and raise my children to be good Christians.
Gee whiz.