As creators, especially conscious creators, it’s important to get out and feed the imagination regularly. Julia Cameron calls this taking yourself out on an Artist Date. So tonight, I took myself out and reconnected with my past — those years ago when I was an Interdisciplinary Arts student at Columbia College.
Tonight was the opening of the Retrospective exhibit of paper and book artist, Marilyn Sward at the Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts. I went down to 11th Street @ Wabash in Chicago to see the opening and reconnect with some old friends, including the brilliant and ever-delightful artist/educator/curator Suzanne Cohan-Lange. Bestselling author Audrey Niffenegger was there, also a former colleague of Marilyn’s.
The late Marilyn Sward was one of my teachers when I was getting my grad degree at Columbia. She was utterly passionate about hand-made paper and the book arts. Jeff Abell, another of my Columbia teachers, is putting together the catalog, coming out later this summer.
From her early sketchbooks to her late aerial photographs, with paper installations, hand-made books, and everything in between, Marilyn was profoundly engaged as both artist and teacher. It is good to be reminded that creations come in many shapes and sizes, and that artists contribute in many ways.
As I stood on the Roosevelt Road elevated platform in the early evening sunset, to the West, the towers of St. Ignatius reared up, at least a mile away. Closer by, the glass high rises along South Michigan Ave. glittered in the waning sunlight. Away to the East, across Lake Shore Drive, I was looking right in the front door of the Shedd Aquarium. Chicago stood awash in its most gorgeous light.
In a different vein, as I write this, the firecrackers are still popping all around me and horns still blare periodically, as Chicago celebrates the Stanley Cup win for Chicago’s own Blackhawks.
Jeanne Kolenda wrote this evening about the seeming inability of people to notice beauty even when it’s right there in the subway, playing a Stradivarius. So this is a sort of time-out post to acknowledge, appreciate, and be conscious of the complex fabric of life fully lived all around me — at least today.
There will be time enough for more bridge-building tomorrow.