Latest / The Art of Aging / Episode 5 - The Artist Within Us

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Episode 5 - The Artist Within Us · The Art of Aging

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to the Art of Aging podcast, produced right here at Montgomery Place, where we celebrate life, honor legacy, and build a community where residents thrive at every stage of life.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Today's episode is entitled The Artist Within Us.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: We are honored to welcome Lois Baring.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Lois is a gifted and accomplished artist whose work has been featured in galleries and exhibits across the country, including major art markets.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: Most recently, Lois showcased here in Chicago at Compound Yellow.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: This year, Lois will celebrate her 91st birthday, and her story is one of creativity, curiosity, resilience, and a lifelong passion for the arts.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: The Art of Aging is hosted by Mark Millet, president and CEO of Montgomery Place, and sponsored by Trinity Rehab, Unodyme, Life Care at Home, and Plant Moran.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, welcome back to season two of the Art of Aging podcast.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: For our season one viewers, you may have noticed we updated our studio from season one.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: We are here at Montgomery Place on the 10th floor in one of our two-bedroom apartments overlooking the lake, which is a beautiful view.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, Lois, let's just start at the beginning.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: What is your earliest childhood memory?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well, I happen to know what the what that is.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: I remember lying in a crib.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: And um the crib had a siding of it that was woven.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: It was you know made of uh reed or something like that.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I just remember looking at it and putting my fingers in the in the hold.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_02: I must have been a baby.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: You must have been, you must have been open.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: So when and where did you first discover your love for art?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: I was always uh drawing and coloring and painting and stuff.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_02: And when I actually decided uh that I wanted to be an artist, it was in 1948, after World War II.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: The Monuments Men had had rescued all of these paintings that had been looted and so on.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: A show of that work was um here at the um art institute.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: For some reason my mother took me, I think, because I was always drawing and painting and stuff.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: And um anyway, we went to that and I was just floored by how amazing the work was.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know what I understood about it, but I thought it was wonderful.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I I guess I had pretty good taste because it was wonderful, really, in retrospect, too.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, it had uh some of the great pa European paintings, um, mostly uh well, a lot of Northern Res Renaissance particularly, but they also had earlier work.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know uh until much later that I had actually seen that work here in in Chicago in 1948, but I had a catalog that I kept.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so later on, and I was already an artist, I looked at I looked at the cover and I saw that in some in some situation that I knew that it was the work from from the looted paintings.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I did arts and crafts as a little boy, and my mom would put them on the refrigerator.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Oh yes.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: But I knew I wasn't talented.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: When did you realize that you really, really were talented as an artist?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell Well, that's a very hard question to answer because one always thinks that you're not good enough.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, uh at least I need to be better.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: But um when people began to notice that my work was better than other people's, and perhaps uh when I really knew that I had something special was my first two years of college were at uh Miami of Ohio.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, and I I majored in fine arts, I think it was a design course or something like that, and they gave us um pieces of colored paper.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Our homework was to just make some kind of uh collage with this, and so I did, and um then when we got to the class to show our work, we were asked to put put it up on the wall, and then you know the teacher walked around and looked at everything and said, No, this woman this person has a very sophisticated color knowledge or something like that.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought I had never even heard of what that was.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was when I thought, oh my god, you know, because I didn't I hadn't learned anything about color, I just had it.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: So did you dabble in other forms of art and y you know, I mean you're a beautiful painter.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: What other forms of art did you experience or you you know, kind of explore before really settling on on painting?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_02: If you want to graduate, you have to take certain things.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_02: So I uh had to take jewelry making and um c sculpture using, you know, a hammer and chisel on stone and soldering to make jewelry and stuff.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: I was very bad at that.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Do you recall the first piece of art that you sold?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And what was that feeling like?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: It was the first show that I was ever in.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: I mean the first professional show uh in in New York.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it was a new talent show uh at Poindexter Gallery, which no longer exists.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: But in any case, uh I I sold two paintings and that and then I thought, well, my God, I made it, you know.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: But there's a lot more to making it.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: That was a great feeling.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: It was uh marvelous.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's gotta be something when someone you you know sees something that you've done and feel the value enough to say, let me give you money for that.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you know, that's really good yes, that's really gotta be, you know, an incredible feeling too.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: Where did your passion and inspiration come from just to to continue?
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's more like a need, I suppose, because it's just wanting to do that, just wanting to do it.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, art comes from, uh I I mean, I think it's a it's sort of a natural thing that human beings have.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think it comes from loss of some kind, because you wouldn't do anything if you thought everything were perfect, processing whatever you see or hear or feel, and uh somehow changing it in some way and putting it into the world in a in a better way.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you have several beautiful things displayed um around Montgomery Place here.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the things I was most impressed with was when you were telling me about the cutouts that you do.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: So tell me about that.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: Where did that idea come from?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that was pretty unique and and how did you get started with that?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: The specific memory of when I had that idea, yes, my husband and I uh were painting the loft that we lived in.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: And um I was sitting on the floor resting and looking at a paint can and with a brush on top of it, and I just and I just painted it.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: And um then I thought it would look better if it wasn't contained in this artificial space, but if I if I just took it out and put it on the wall, it just seemed that it would be bigger uh and more active in some way.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it sounds like you've always been very busy.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, you just recently had an art show here in Chicago.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know, can you recall like the number of art shows that that you've that you've had or what what was your what was your favorite art show that you participated in?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: The show that I liked best was an invitational in 1977, an artist run gallery in New York City called 55 Mercer.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's an enormous, enormous space.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's two huge lofts that are together.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: And there were three other women artists who I knew.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: We all got a lot of reviews of that.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: And it was it was really a nice show.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: And we had all, by that time, people were aware of us in the art world.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: As as you reflect back on your life and your career, how has art just shaped your aging journey?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Being able to make art is a is a very uh gives me, and I think I suppose anybody who doesn't a terrific feeling of agency, you can make that.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: You know, knowing about art enriches one's life.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: I think it is a source of strength that one can feel.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe people who play instruments feel that too.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_02: You have something you can do.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: So what keeps you inspired to continue to create today?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: Things that I see, like what I was looking at this morning.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: I even had ideas, well, how could I do this?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's that.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you see something and you want to do something with it.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: What advice would you give to a young artist who is starting out today?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's a hard way to make a living.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: It's just very rich, and I mean it makes you feel when you are totally concentrated and you're working and you forget everything else around you, but you're just focusing on what you're doing, and you know that you can do it and you're doing it.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: That is eternity.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that people need something to do in their lives.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: It makes them feel worthwhile.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: You can do that at any level, too.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate your your artwork and you know, just and just have you allowed, you know, us at Montgomery Place to see it, you know, how you have it displayed and you know, and your art show and and and you're still you know active with that.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: You're one of our editors for The Messenger, and so your writing and you you know your talent, you just continue to use it and showcase it here at Montgomery Place, which is which is just really incredible.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you for that.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_02: You're welcome.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: And and that uh actually being on The Messenger, I was w working on closing uh putting it to bed pretty soon.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um it is that is something I love doing, uh, and also working on the films committee.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: And um uh uh, you know, we need uh new we need new people who will contribute because we need people who uh who have followed movies all their lives, but who are still, you know, at least if they don't go to the movies, they're keep they're reading up.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, yes.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Lois, we're gonna move into the next section of our podcast, which is called the MP3.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: So the Montgomery Place Three Questions.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we ask all of our guests that participate on our podcast these same questions.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: So our MP3 today is sponsored by The Art of Aging is made possible in part by Trinity Rehab.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Trinity Rehab provides more than exceptional therapy services.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: They're dedicated to helping people recover, regain independence, and return to the activities they enjoy.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Montgomery Place is grateful for the compassionate care and expertise they bring to its residents.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: So are you ready?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: First question.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: If you could go back and give your 20-year-old self one piece of advice, what would you tell yourself?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh follow your dream and be assertive.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Good advice.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: So what lesson has taken you a lifetime to learn?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, to be patient.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still working on that one.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's a that's a that's a good one.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, driving in Chicago traffic.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, definitely.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: And to be patient with our weather.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it was, you know, like you said, every 15 minutes the view of the lake changes.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: So last question: what is the one thing that still brings you joy today in your life?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: That brings you the most joy in your life today?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: What's that one thing?
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: That is hard to answer because there are many things that bring me joy.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things is eating dinner with the with friends here at Montgomery Place.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but also uh thinking about paintings that I might make.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_02: Just knowing other people and and having friendships, of course.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it is very important.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I was thank you for sharing your story, your wisdom, and your incredible artistic journey with us today.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: You are truly uh creative and an inspiration to all of us here at MicroMay Place.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a couple parting gifts, though, for you for being a guest with us today.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: So our gifts are provided by Clarence Davis, who is an award-winning landscape company who, as you know, takes care of our gardens here at McGrove Place.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: They do, they do.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: So they are so it's a nice uh you know cup to put a cold or hot beverage in, and um, and then of course a very stylish jacket to uh to keep you warm and a quarter.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we have that for sure.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you again for joining us today.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: You're welcome.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for having me.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: You're welcome.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again to our sponsors, Trinity Rehab, Unodyne, Life Care at Home, and Plant Moran.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, keep living fully, keep aging artfully, and keep sharing those stories that matter most.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for watching and listening.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: We will see you next time on the Art of Aging.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Art of Aging podcast is produced by Montgomery Place.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: For more information, visit MontgomeryPlace.org.