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© 2007 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights
reserved.
LEHI, Utah — Tom Holdman has created art glass for some
high-profile LDS temples, including Palmyra, Nauvoo, Manhattan,
Winter Quarters, and Sao Paulo, but his work for the Rexburg Temple
in rural Idaho is no less in the local significance he strives
to place in each design.
For the Church’s newest temple, which rises from a hill
surrounded by wheat fields in a farming community in southeastern
Idaho, Holdman and seven other artists at his studios drafted
on paper and fabricated in glass individual designs portraying
a staff of wheat.
Glass artist Tom Holdman checks a window for the
Draper Temple in front of a panel that simulates daylight. Holdman
Studios created more than 700 windows for the Rexburg Temple.
After the designs were submitted to the temple
committee, the one by Josh Lewis, a Lone Peak High School senior
who was working for Holdman and saving for his mission, was chosen
as the motif. Holdman then went on to design more than 700 windows
using the chosen theme. The wheat motif — a symbol of the
area’s agricultural economy — also appears in fabrics,
carpet, woodwork, and decorative painting in the temple.
High school student Josh Lewis designed the stained glass motif
that was used throughout the temple. © 2007 Intellectual
Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved.
Josh, who recently
returned from the Germany Hamburg Mission as the finishing touches
were being put on the temple, has yet to see the windows for himself,
except in photos that friends have sent him. Holdman, by contrast,
has made at least 10 trips to Rexburg to oversee installation
of the windows.
Josh recalls that night four years ago as the design deadline
drew near: "I’d had a lot of homework that day and
I was fasting, because I knew I had to get everything done. It
was about 2 a.m. I said a prayer, and the idea just flowed to
me to use lines connecting and disappearing. I’d never worked
with that before."
Josh Lewis puts finishing touches on a window for
the Rexburg Temple. His design of the staff of wheat, submitted
while he was a senior in high school, was chosen while he was
serving a mission in Germany. (Photo courtesy Holdman Studios.)
"The best part,"
he says, "was that I was eight months into my mission before
I found out my design had been chosen." When he returned
home to Highland last month, he again went to work at Holdman
Studios, located at Thanksgiving Point. As does Holdman, Josh
feels blessed to be able to be a part of a temple’s building
process.
The artist and a staffer piece together a stained
glass representation of Mount Timpanogos, near Holdman's Utah
home.
Employees at the studio
are also busy creating art glass windows for two more temples
under construction — in Draper, Utah, and Twin Falls, Idaho.
Holdman points out the potato blossom — Idaho’s state
flower — that will grace windows in the Twin Falls Temple.
Here is the stained glass motif as it looks in
the Rexburg Idaho Temple. © 2007 Intellectual Reserve, Inc.
All rights reserved.
The local touch has
been important to the artist, who begins a project by researching
the local history, culture and surroundings of the temple where
his work will be placed. He then incorporates those elements,
along with natural materials from the area, into his designs.
For example, his stained-glass windows in the Palmyra Temple —
his first project for the LDS Church — feature trees and
leaves that blend in with the trees beyond and evoke the Sacred
Grove. For the Winter Quarters Temple, he designed round pieces
etched with prairie flowers on the borders and painted with figures
and scenes depicting the pioneer trek. (He's also responsible
for the large panel portraying the baptism of Jesus in the Nauvoo
Temple's baptistry, as well as the art-glass dome above the Celestial
Room there.)
For the Sao Paulo Temple, he chose
to depict a pivotal scene in the continent's history — that
of the Savior’s appearance to the Nephites, as chronicled
in Third Nephi of the Book of Mormon. His work also appears in
the remodeled Hawaii and Mesa temples.
For the San Antonio Temple, he depicted wildflowers of the area
and incorporated stones found in a cave near the construction
site. He has used some of the same leftover stones for the Rexburg
Temple’s windows. "You see them as you walk into the
Celestial Room," he explains. "They’re part of
the design element of the windows."
Holdman says he really appreciates the architectural design of
the new Rexburg Temple, where "every room has an outside
window, and that lets in a lot of natural light."
Another artist, Leon Parson, Rexburg native and a member of the
art faculty at BYU-Idaho, created murals for two rooms in the
temple using local wildlife and familiar landscapes, including
the river bottoms and the towering Tetons. He painted eight panels,
each 10 feet high and 27 feet long.
In addition to local flavor added by artists, a Church new release
says, "Of particular note in the interior is the stonework
of Idaho Travertine. Local stonemasons describe their contributions
as ‘a labor of heart and soul,’ an opportunity to
use their well-honed skills in their own, local temple."
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