​We can see them out our sunny bedroom windows—the towers and turrets of our hometown castle, the Jasper County Courthouse! They are right over there just beyond the Library and Central Park. When the neighborhood trees are in their full green regalia their lushness will obscure this sweet perspective. With our imaginations tickled, we’ll take a stroll downtown to get a close up view as “Art.A.Fair” debuts April 13, 2019, around the courthouse on the historic Carthage square.
 
Pictures seen or imagined through windows can be so deliciously enticing in any season whether in small towns or in cities. Depending on the neighborhood where I set up in greater New York City, I enjoyed a remarkable variety of sights to see and savor.
 
Living with my two children in Manhattan’s Chelsea at General Theological Seminary, from beneath the steep, peaked roofs of our top floor walk-up we looked out over the Seminary’s Close that filled an entire Manhattan city block with tennis courts, a large playground, rambling paths lined with benches and spring tulips and the Victorian red brick faces of the chapel and the classrooms and the housing where Clement Clark Moore wrote “The Night Before Christmas” and Desmond Tutu visited from South Africa.
 
In Greenwich Village my studio garret windows on one side showed me neighboring interlocking courtyards. On the other side I could gaze down onto a very narrow brick-and-brownstone-lined street that led around the corner to what’s often described as the 1873 “narrowest house” in NYC where Edna St. Vincent Millay lived and wrote.
 
As often as I could, I ran away and took the train out to Fire Island where I set up studio in a friend’s weather-worn, Dutch Colonial barn-like clapboard. Taking breaks from my easels or my books I could look down and out to the Atlantic stretching, stretching to the horizon, the waves wafting in and out and lapping at the wooden boardwalks that laced together the houses on this foot-traversed, nature-preserved, car-less island where residents carted their supplies in little red wagons.
 
While situated in the Italian neighborhood of Carroll Gardens (the movie “Moonstruck” was made here with a cameo by the Cammareri bakery where I traded), I biked to lap swim at the borough’s YMCA, grabbed a carry-out lunch at a taqueria then shouldered my bicycle round and round up five flights of stairs. Here in my railroad one bedroom my salon windows gave me an excellent perspective on Staten Island and our Statue of Liberty gifted to us all by our French friends from across the pond.
 
How happy I am to have had these window views and so, so many others as I’ve moved about here and there—in and off our continent, city to country, wilderness to mountaintop, metropolis to small town Carthage. Of all the views I’ve seen and savored among my very favorite are those I see every day in Carthage, looking out our windows or moving over the sidewalks and streets of our beloved Camelot. Yes, that’s how several locals introduced Carthage to me when I first arrived. Camelot—a perfect descriptor for our Midwestern village and our historic downtown square anchored with our storybook castle—our towered courthouse.
 
Very soon our new spring festival, Art.A.Fair, will be our town’s centerpiece from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, April 13, 2019, generously underwritten by artCentral, Carthage Council on the Arts, Kristi Montague of Edward Jones, KOKA Art and Design, Leggett & Platt, Old Missouri Bank and Race Brothers. For this inaugural festival day our courthouse castle will be surrounded by a village of white-peaked tents—tents overflowing with talents as our town square showcases and celebrates local artists, fine art crafters, musicians, galleries, restaurants, shops and businesses.

What fabulous, visionary talent has brought Art.A.Fair to our fair Maple Leaf City like a renaissance emergence out of the long-running monthly Carthage Art Walks.
 
 This spring’s Art.A.Fair has been months in the making led by the inspiring Maple Leaf Festival phenom, Jeanine Poe; encouraged by the dedication of Robert Denning at the helm of the Carthage Council on the Arts; media shared by the artistry and digital wizardry of Koral Martin who created the terrific Art.A.Fair logo; and brought to life by a hard-working committee including media guru Wendi Douglas, the always can-do Doug Osborn,  Hip Handmade Market coordinator Emma Bell, as well as Niki Cloud at the Carthage Convention and Visitors Bureau, Samantha McDaniel and Amanda Stone of the Joplin Globe, Teri Y. Diggs of Spellbound, Kara Hardesty of Mother Road Coffee, Neely Myers of the Carthage Chamber of Commerce and myself on behalf of artCentral.
 
Come brighten your window on the world with a special view of the arts in Carthage at Art.A.Fair. Let the sun shine in and watch our Camelot sparkle!

​No need to dress up unless you really want to get a little fancy. Just arrive as you’re most comfortable, and you’ll find yourself having a very good time looking at art and enjoying delicious complimentary eats and libations among art lovers and art makers and all kinds of good folks who are as friendly and as casual as this elegant old foursquare farmhouse artCentral calls home.
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Meet Connie Miller of Joplin the artist-creator of this house-full of vibrant paintings. She will be happy to visit, hear your responses and share with you her inspiration and her process for art-making. Connie’s smarts and her humor and her sense of unabridged whimsy shine through in her words, as well as her art works, when she makes self-aware observations like, “I find color to be mysterious and magical with influence over our emotions, psyche and choices”.

Connie has an enchantingly unique way of experiencing life and translating her discoveries with paint. She’s a wizard at finding subjects to fill her picture planes. Working from photographs and printed images she discovers inspiration in people like you and me and in places. Her impulses to paint can also be triggered by our companion creatures, by plants and by whatever else turns her artistic head and gets her brushes going.

Connie’s artist-chosen exhibition title “Conversations in Color” tells us this artist sure knows how to get colors talking. A lot of the discourse in her paintings depends on color relationships and their configurations and Connie’s colorful imagination. In her words, “I never try to mimic realistic subjects but use them as a springboard for composition, form and color. If the shape representing a cat in an arrangement needs to be blue, I paint the cat blue. Trees may be purple, grass might be red and hair could be green according to placement of color in the composition. I am constantly re-imagining color to create the impact I need.”

Connie thinks of herself as a contemporary Modern Expressionist. Using intense saturations she is forever delving into the possibilities of color and taking risks with them. Beginning each artwork with a pencil line drawing broken down into abstract shapes, she then utilizes dark, bold painted outlines in the manner of admired painters Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse.
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With a slight leaning toward cubism and a palette that has become stronger through the years, Connie continues to grow and learn in her expressions. Whatever Connie’s subjects are up to—whether they are dancing, walking or resting; standing, leaning or slouching; thinking, primping or gesturing; conversing with a cat or a sand crab—they are each and every one grabbing our attention and telling us “Look! Look at me! I am strong, bold and brilliant!”

Want to discover and begin a conversation with your own inner colorist? Want to learn the secrets and tricks of communicating with paints and colors? Whether you’re a practicing artist or an aspiring artist wanna-be, sign up for Connie Miller’s Draw-and-Paint Studio Workshop. Spend two delightful hours in the galleries of artCentral on Saturday, May 11, 2019, 2:00-4:00 p.m. learning from an experienced, expert practitioner.

​For Connie Miller’s Draw-and-Paint Studio Workshop the fee is $20 paid in advance and includes all supplies and the promise you’ll be taking home lots of valuable instruction plus your own colorfully painted gourd birdhouse.

Take the time to explore the effect of color in your life. Go back in time to your first interactions with color and examine your personal color experiences since then. Do your color senses come from fashion? Or food? Or the natural world around us? Connie will tell you, “Everything you needed to know about color you learned in kindergarten.” She’ll review Basic Color Theory and guide you in creating a color wheel. She’ll freak you out with the science of how we see color and the effects of light. She’ll have your brain on color as you learn how color influences our emotions and even our health as you define your own color preferences and create your own personal color palette.
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Spaces are limited for this terrific opportunity. Sign up asap—on Friday at the Artist Opening or call (417) 358-4404 now and make your reservations for a happy, fun and inspiring afternoon playing with colors in the company of Connie Miller and colorful others like yourself!

Under the heading titled “Field Trip”, follows “Red, Blue, Yellow”, musings by David Kortava. As the story goes there are two groups of MOMA curators on a pilgrimage. Divided into two taxis they are en route to visit the grave of the Dutch-born abstract painter Piet Mondrian. The occasion is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the painter’s death.
 
MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, and Piet Mondrian are two of my great loves discovered in Manhattan and still longed for often. Pieter Cornelis Mondriann, painter and theoretician, was born in Amersfoort, Netherlands in 1872. He became Piet Mondrian after 1906. As a 1940 refugee, Piet Mondrian fled Europe for New York where he lived courtesy of friend in a small mid-town apartment until his death from pneumonia three and a half years later at age seventy-one.
 
Mondrian is now regarded as one of the significant pioneers of abstract art and one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. From a beginning of figurative painting he changed his artistic direction to an increasingly abstract style until his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements making his best works a perfect fit for MOMA.
 
MOMA is considered by many to have the world’s most outstanding collection of modern western masterpieces offering an overview of modern and contemporary architecture and design, sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and prints, as well as illustrated and artists' books, film and electronic media. The library includes approximately 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs. I spent many, many hours there on my days off from my day job where I managed the Greenwich Village boutique of a small fashion house.
 
At MOMA the stripped-down graphic qualities of Mondrian’s later works caught my attention. His affection for jazz spurred my imagination. I was particularly reminded of his oil painting, “Broadway Boogie Woogie” (1942-1943) sometimes when I found myself peering out from windows rising high above the patterns of the city’s colorful straight streets with their interlocking intersections and seemingly static movement.
 
The curatorial Mondrian aficionados traveled Mondrian’s streets. Leaving MOMA at 53rd Street on the east side of midtown Manhattan, they went over the East River and across Brooklyn. They arrived at the two-hundred-and-twenty acre burial ground, Cypress Hills Cemetery, which straddles the boundary between the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
 
When the GPS of one cab announced their arrival, the passengers stepped out into a sea of grave stones crusted with winter’s white. Shivering they waited for their colleagues in the second cab. No cab arrived. Instead a phone message was received from the chief curator of painting and sculptures who was texting from the front entrance and inquiring the location of the other pilgrims. They replied they are somewhere in the middle of the cemetery’s expansive maze and had no idea of the true location of Mondrian’s grave. Like displaced souls lost in a snowy limbo they huddled confused!

Finally united at the cemetery office, together they selected a token for their tribute—a bouquet from those on display for purchase—choosing the colors that would please the painter, rejecting blossoms and stems of unacceptable colors.

Mondrian was a man of specific tastes. Just as he would not have appreciated the cemetery’s curvy layout (he much preferred the organized straight lines of Manhattan’s street grid), he would have disdained any of the colors outside the range of his chosen palette. In his mature years his pigment choices included only primary colors, never using the green that dominated the landscapes of his emerald green Dutch homeland.
 
With the help of a groundskeeper leading them in a pickup truck, the curators finally found Mondrian’s grave near a sign reading “Crescent Knoll”.  Gathered around the headstone they placed their flowers. As the group looked out to the Manhattan skyline a curator played “Boogie Woogie Stomp” on a cell phone to honor Mondrian’s love of jazz.
 
With happy anticipation David and I, too, are eager to make our journey east and together look out over the Manhattan skyline. Though we will not take time to make a pilgrimage to the Cypress Hills Cemetery, we will most certainly seek out Mondrian’s paintings at MOMA. With a soundtrack of jazz delivered through our smart phones we will admire the colors and grids of the Manhattan that inspired some of Mondrian’s best late paintings, including “Broadway Boogie Woogie."

For a week everywhere I went around town someone reminded me of the time change—that we should make our clocks spring forward. “Don’t forget!” they kept saying. Every year no matter how many kindly encouragements I hear, I get to twirling, and I almost always forget to make the change.

This year I put a reminder prompt on my cell phone. Voilà! Daylight Saving Time began last Sunday, and David and I remembered to set ahead every clock in our house. Thank goodness our digital devices take care of themselves, even my Fitbit.

I recall the wisdom of the comic genius, the sometimes “Captain Marvel”, Stan Lee: “You know, my motto is 'Excelsior',” he said. “That's an old word that means 'upward and onward to greater glory.' It's on the seal of the State of New York. Keep moving forward….”

Thinking of the State of New York and moving forward, we’ll soon be heading east to meet our granddaughter Sophie’s new little sister Alexandra. We’ll have four glorious days with the girls and their parents and their Dobie, Trooper, in their new home beside an expansive old horse farm. We’ll get to play, play, play indoors and out and visit their favorite go-to places (playgrounds and pastry shops!). The day Sophie goes back to school we’ll take the train into the city.

One glorious day we’ll have to adventure in this fabulous metropolis I used to call home. Of course there’s the temptation to spend our precious time with my walking David up and down my memory lanes through my old haunts and neighborhoods in Manhattan’s Chelsea and Greenwich Village and in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens. Instead we’re planning our “art and parks” agenda to look something like this:

We’ll start early and be waiting when the doors swing open beneath the grand arched and columned entrance of the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Packed with 5,000 years of human history told in art, this place can be overwhelming, so we’ll have to pick and choose. I’ll want to visit one of my favorites—the tinted bronze and tutu-ed (2018 refreshed) fourteen-year-old Little Dancer exquisitely rendered by Edgar Degas. Maybe we’ll take in a major current exhibition or just wander through until we find ourselves in the rooftop sculpture gardens overlooking Central Park with stunning views of the city’s impressive skyline.

In Central Park we’ll weave among the bikers and runners and skaters and puppy walkers. There are plenty of canines to see. The statue of the famed sled dog, Balto, has been a treasure for almost a century. Just one of the park’s touching memorials.
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Making our way past the old Dairy and the Carousel to The Pond and the Arcade and the female artist designed Bethesda Fountain, we’ll cross over the Bow Bridge with boaters paddling beneath us. We’ll go past the Sheep Meadow, where I used to play Frisbee, turn cartwheels and practice the Lindy with my kids on our picnic brunch Sundays. This day David and I will stand quietly at New York City’s living memorial to former Beatles member, songwriter, musician, artist and peace activist John Lennon.

Fashioned similarly to the original flowing design of the park, the area is lined with tall elm trees, shrubs, flowers and rocks. This teardrop shaped region was a park favorite of Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono. They lived in the Dakota Apartments adjacently located to this space. Looking up at the Dakota towers we’ll feel again the sorrow of hearing on December 8, 1980, that John Lennon had been shot dead when walking into his home.

To commemorate his life and talents, on March 26, 1981, City Council Member Henry J. Stern designated this area as Strawberry Fields after the title of the Beatles' song "Strawberry Fields Forever." The iconic black and white “Imagine” mandala mosaic was designed by a team of artists from the Italian city of Naples. Named after another famous song by John Lennon, "Imagine" evokes a vision and hope for a world without strife, war and conflict. A bronze plaque lists the more than 120 countries that planted flowers and donated money for the maintenance of the area; they have also endorsed Strawberry Fields as a Garden of Peace.

While there we’ll surely think of our Carthage friend, Sandy Higgins—lover of art and artists, founder and first director of artCentral, peacenik and admirer of John Lennon and all the goodness for which he stood.

Carrying the peace of this place, we’ll move beyond the park to meander through the energized city streets and grab a quick bite of lunch off a vendor's cart and find a bistro for a sidewalk cappuccino. We’ll spend an art afternoon at MOMA followed by a long trek down The High Line before we return home to our sweet New Jersey family and our plane ride back to our furries and feathers in Carthage where spring will surely be moving forward all around us.

Just imagine!