We made and broke the road from Nauvoo to this place…And we killed rattlesnakes by the cord in some places; and made roads and built bridges till our backs ached. Where we could not build bridges across rivers we ferried our people across, until we arrived here, where we found a few naked Indians, a few wolves and rabbits, and any amount of crickets; but as for any green tree or a fruit tree, or any green fields, we found nothing of the kind…God has shown me, that this is the spot to locate his people, and here is where they will prosper; he will temper the elements to the good of the Saints; he will rebuke the frost and the sterility of the soil, and the land shall become fruitful… and we shall build a city and a temple to the most high God in this place.
Brigham Young

Brigham Young was defiant, resolute—unapologetically shaped by conflict and conviction. Not a man softened by time, but one who leaned into history’s jagged edge.

He did not inherit a settled gospel; he inherited a question: how to carry Joseph’s mantle when the Church was young—and fracturing. Controversy was not his flaw but his forge. He did not walk a path already smoothed—he carved it across deserts and doubt. Through genius, grit, and a discipline few moderns can fathom, he rooted Zion in the Rockies. He raised temples in exile. He gave form to the faith before the faith had found its own.
He was not perfect. He was not meant to be. But in the history of spiritual colonization—where few ever succeeded—Brigham did.

The digital background of Brigham’s portrait is not landscape, but the revelations and scriptures that guided his life: raw color, fragmented ideology—becoming increasingly intricate and ordered the closer we look. It metaphorically reflects the nature of divine truth, which unfolds not all at once but line upon line, through study, experience, and the quiet guidance of the Spirit.

Like the scriptures, the background is luminous and inexhaustible.
What begins in abstraction becomes clear in layers:
recursive and alive to the one who seeks.

It is an invitation—
not merely to see,
but to return.