The art communicates ideas
very quickly and very powerfully.
There's the saying, "A picture's worth a thousand words,"
and I want to use art to portray in
one image a thousand words.
Instead of a typical column of soft white light,
I portrayed yellow, almost Old Testament fire.
Joseph, in multiple of the accounts,
mentions the word "fire."
He even, in his first attempts, says,
"I saw a column of fire,"
and then crosses it out, and says,
"I saw a column of light."
The Father and the Son are not
right next to one another.
The reason why is because in
at least three of the accounts,
there's an indication that they did not
appear at the same time.
In one of the accounts, it says,
"One being appeared,
and then after a while,
another came to the side of the first."
You'll see behind the Father and the Son
a concourse of angels.
I pulled that from the 1835 account, where
Joseph almost as a postscript, says,
"And I saw many angels in the grove."
And that's not typically depicted,
but I think it's a wonderful visual.
In the bottom left of the painting, you'll
see that I painted a depiction of the Adversary
fleeing the grove.
You don't typically see Satan in the same
picture with the Father and the Son,
but I wanted to include all three
to send a message that the Father and the Son
have power over the Adversary.
In the bottom right corner of the image, 
you'll see an ax put into a stump.
In one of the accounts, Joseph says that he
went to the place where he left his ax.
I wanted to include not as just a nice detail,
but because to me, it shows that
the First Vision was thought out.
Joseph wasn't going to a random place.
He had pre-thought where he wanted to go
and where he wanted to pray.
In a lot of First Vision imagery, you'll see
that the grove is full of green leaves,
but Joseph said the vision happened in early spring.
And in early spring in New York,
most trees are barren.
But I did put some hints of leaves on there.
I think that's a great metaphor of a world
that's gone through a barren apostasy,
getting ready to shoot forth
with the fulness of the everlasting gospel.
One reason why painting the First Vision 
has been so meaningful is because
I've realized that we need form our conceptions
of the vision based off what Joseph said,
not necessarily what artists like me have depicted.
Depictions of the First Vision can
inspire us and inform us,
but they can also, in my opinion, slightly limit us
because we think that that is the way
it must have happened,
when there's a lot of ways to envision the vision.
