NEWS + MEMBER EXHIBITS
by Micheline Klagsbrun
Schoenherr Art Gallery at Wentz Fine Arts Center, North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, is hosting a solo exhibition by Naperville artist and NAWA member, Marilyn Dale. The exhibition dates are October 21, 2025, to December 5, 2025. There will be a Reception on Veterans Day, November 11, 2025, from 6 pm to 8pm.
Between the Lines, is a moving solo exhibition that translates more than 500 World War II-era letters into evocative mixed-media paintings. These deeply personal letters were written by the artist’s father, Chester, to her mother, Irene, while he served in the Pacific Theater in 1944 and 1945. Though never overtly romantic, his letters—written nearly every day when possible—reveal a quiet emotional intimacy, even as he shielded her from the horrors he was experiencing. Six months after the war with Japan ended, the couple married.
The letters had been saved for decades, surviving a shed fire and a move, then sat untouched for 25 years following Irene’s death. When Dale retired as a marketing executive in early 2024, she returned to her first love—artmaking—and finally turned to the project that had long lived in the back of her mind: transforming her parents’ wartime correspondence into an exhibition. Several months into the work, Dale realized the timing held deeper significance—2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII in the Pacific, officially declared on September 2, 1945—also Irene’s birthday.
In Between the Lines, Dale incorporates many of the actual letters, personal photographs, devotionals, and wartime ephemera into the layered surfaces of her paintings. The work explores three emotional currents that run through the correspondence: longing—for love, family, and normalcy, faith—in survival, in God, and in the power of prayer, and camaraderie—the constant, unspoken bond between soldiers who endured the unendurable together.
Marilyn Dale’s Am I Still breathing.
Dale recounted the story behind this correspondence and her art: “What began as ink on fragile paper has become a body of artwork—letters from Chester to Irene, transformed through my eyes, their daughter, into painted meditations on distance, devotion, and survival.
Born of longing for an ordinary life in extraordinary times, their love took shape not through courtship, but through words carried across the seas. Against the backdrop of war—with its scarcity, separation, and faraway battlefields—the letters between them became both lifeline and promise.
The story begins, fittingly, with a wedding. In 1938, Florence Golata married Mitchell Mackowiak. Each came from a large Polish-American family. Teofil and Helen Mackowiak had five children who grew to adulthood—Mike, Martha, Chester, Emil, and Richard—with one daughter, Stella, lost in infancy. Joseph and Veronica Golata had five as well—John, Florence, Harriet, Alfred, and the youngest, Irene. When Irene was just eighteen months old, her father died, leaving Veronica to raise the family alone.
It was at that wedding of his brother to Irene’s sister that Chester, then 20, noticed Irene, 18 and newly graduated from high school—the first and only in her family to do so. Years later, in a letter, he would recall that day as the moment he first fell in love. For the next six years they saw each other occasionally at family gatherings but never courted.
In 1943, Chester became an infantryman for the United States Army answering the call to defend his country. As he shipped out to the Pacific Theater, he began writing to Irene. Throughout 1944 and 1945, she received and saved more than 500 of his letters – and surely she responded in kind. He promised to write every day and nearly kept that vow, pausing only when combat or exhaustion silenced his pen. Irene kept fragments of her replies—perhaps twenty drafts, some in shorthand—offering a rare echo of her own voice from the home front.
Woven through these letters are three timeless themes: the longing that shadows every separation, the faith that sustains hope in dark hours, and the camaraderie that binds those who endure war side by side. As their daughter, I have reimagined these lines of text and what feelings may have existed between the lines in paint—layering fragments of many of the original letters with photographs, maps, and memory. In this way, the private devotion between two people might speak more universally, to the ways we all cling to love and connection in uncertain times.
On the surface, the content may seem simple: weather reports, family news, requests for photographs. But between the lines lies everything that could not be said—the ache of absence, the fear that tomorrow might not come, the fragile but steady hope that love would endure until peace returned. In these paintings, that story—and that hope—is made visible: layered, luminous, and still speaking across the years.”
Between the Lines is both an act of remembrance and a quiet revelation of how love took shape not in grand gestures, but in daily words, faithfully written across oceans and silence.
About Marilyn Dale
Marilyn Dale is a contemporary painter whose original works have been juried into multiple galleries and exhibitions. Her pieces range from intimate small-scale works to bold statement paintings. She served as the president of the Naperville Art League and taught a variety of art classes at North Central College continuing education, the Naperville Art League, and DuPage Art League. She also led the Art & Environment Committee for her church for over 10 years as well as designed large scale works for a number of churches across the nation.
Dale earned a Certificate in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Signature Member of NAWA.
This fall, Dale’s work is also featured in a second solo exhibition at Wheaton Public Library’s Arts & Culture Center in Wheaton, IL, from October 2 to October 31, 2025. This exhibition includes abstracts and landscapes in oil and mixed media. For more information, please visit: www.marilyndale.com
