Alumni

Conversations in Paintings and Poetry

By Patty Dowd Schmitz

 What do you get when an artist and a poet join forces to explore their art, lives, and womanhood? You get “conversations in paintings and poetry,” a year-long collaborative artistic endeavor undertaken by poet Kathryn Stitt Bass ’90 and her colleague Kimberly MacArthur Graham.

The duo’s exhibition of paintings and accompanying poems, titled “Within/Without,” ran from March 4 to April 30 at the Western Colorado Center for the Arts in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Bass, who majored in English at Lake Forest College, also holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver. Her poetry has appeared in dozens of journals, including American Tanka, The Amherst Review, The Formalist, The Prose Poem, and Quarter after Eight. In 2002 she was recognized with a State of Colorado Artists’ Fellowship.

Bass met artist Kimberly MacArthur Graham in 2002, and the two 30-something women formed an instant kinship. Their mutual admiration for each other’s creative work and an interest in women’s issues prompted them to form an artistic collaboration. Their meetings were held at local coffee shops and in their homes and were soon dubbed “conversations in paintings and poetry.”

“Kimberly and I would each bring a recent work to our meetings, and we would talk about what was behind our pieces,” says Bass. “Our job was then to go back and respond to that conversation in our own medium.” The result was “Within/Without,” a “dialogue” of their combined works.

 “Several themes emerged over the year that we did this—including feminism, fertility, and creativity,” says Bass. “In following these same threads for a year, we really began to explore what it means to be a woman and also an artist. There is a certain introversion that’s expected of us as artists, but also an extroversion that’s expected of us as women.”

Bass’ interest in creative writing and poetry flourished as a Lake Forest College student. “I gained so much from Professor Rosemary Cowler’s enthusiasm—I still hear her booming voice whenever I read John Donne’s The Sun Rising, and I look back fondly on our talks in her office, where we strayed from the subject of literature to detective fiction, dogs, and good tea. Professor Nance van Winckel helped me find my voice as a poet and encouraged me to pursue my PhD.”

But beyond academics, Bass credits Lake Forest’s size and its setting near Chicago for allowing her to explore many different paths as a student—paths that have led her to the artistic pursuits she enjoys today. “Not only did I edit the literary magazine, Tusitala, but I had a radio show on WMXM; I sang in the choir; I traveled to Greece twice on a semester abroad. I had the freedom to dabble, and that’s the real pleasure of a liberal arts education.”

Bass also directs the Online Poetry Project, teaches with Colorado’s Lighthouse Writers’ Workshops, and visits schools as a Young Audiences residency artist. In addition, she writes marketing materials and names products and services for regional and national clients.

“While I was at Lake Forest, I loved that I could understand Romanticism and Neoclassicism from the perspectives of art history as well as literature,” she says. “It enriched my understanding to recognize that poets like Keats and Shelly and painters like Caspar David Friedrich were working toward the same goals: to express the insignificance of intellect in the face of strong emotion; to assert the isolation of the individual in the context of the great, wild, natural world.”

A 36-page, full-color book on Bass and Graham’s exhibition has been published by Pilgrims Process and is available on Bass’ Web site,  www.kadroodle.com/poetry/book. 

Patty Dowd Schmitz, a frequent contributor to Spectrum, is a journalist based in Barrington, Illinois.