Chicago in January

The first of the new year there is always so much hope. Then the days turn gloomy and dreary and the sweets are all gone. As it happened, I had four days off (slow season at bike shops) and my daughter didn’t need me to babysit, so I hopped a train to Chicago.

I knew from living there that Chicago is just as dreary and gloomy, but the museums are mostly free. The visit was sandwiched with meeting friends at coffee shops and sitting for long hours chatting. Yesss!! I had so many conversations and meeting up with friends broken up by trips to area museums. There’s nothing quite like the slow feel of the Art Institute on a Monday winter afternoon. No one is in a hurry.

There was no crowd around Hopper’s Nighthawks. The painting was just as lonely and isolated as the figures framed within.

Surprisingly there were new additions to the galleries. I had the feeling that during the pandemic someone rooted around in the vaults and brought some new stuff to light. It appeared there were more Marsden Hartley paintings than I last remembered. Some of the ones that I was used to seeing, Landscape No. 3, Cash Entry Mines, New Mexico, seemed to be off exhibit. I also didn’t see hanging Ivan Albright’s The Door or That Which I should have done, I did not do. So I was not bored; there was a great mix of the familiar that made me feel at home, that all was well in the world, and a touch of new which woke me up and reminded me that there is so much more out there. That each and every day we can find something we hadn’t seen before.

a wintery mix of paintings