Julie Robins-Greenberg has been an Elmhurst resident since 1953, when she and her husband, a professor of neurophysiology at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical School, moved here from Galveston, Texas, where they had lived for six years.

During her years in Elmhurst, she raised her three children and worked as a social worker for 10-year stints.

She began at Ray Graham in Elmhurst counseling mentally and physically handicapped young adults and their parents, then moved to Suburban Hospital in Hinsdale working with tuberculosis patients and others.

Finally, she worked at Bensenville Home Society, now Lifelink, where she became an international adoptions worker.

Her children, now living on the east and west coasts, include a lawyer/sculptor, a writer, and an educator. She also has five grandchildren, who range in age from 12 to 28.

"I started working once my children were older," she explained to me on one of the many cold but dazzling winter days that have been part of our lives these past months.

We were sitting in her beautiful mid-century modern home in North Graue Woods enjoying the view of towering oak trees casting blue shadows over the gleaming snow cover.

"The reason for the three separate jobs was that I would accompany my husband on his world travels when he was on sabbatical, so I would have to quit my job and find something new when we returned," she recalled.

In college at Ohio State, she majored in fine arts, but not motivated or encouraged enough, she switched to social work.

However, she was always artistic, whether cutting paper dolls and dressing them, making beads, or designing and making her own clothes.

She took art classes over the years, but it wasn't until the early 1990s that she discovered the medium that inspired her present work, the allure of paper.

"I had a stack of colored paper left over from a class, and while I was attempting to use some of it to cover a bad spot in a watercolor, I realized I was having fun playing around with shapes and colors," she said.

Her work is in a style some would call abstract expressionism because of its reliance on bold color, shapes, and contrast. She mixes colored paper with paint.

Some works start with a recognizable subject while others use aspects of architecture and geometric shapes.

For a solo show at the Elmhurst Artists' Guild in 2004, she prepared an "Artist's Statement."

In it, she talked about how her work evolves, saying, "Ultimately, my art is a semi-controlled process of exploration, discovery, and coincidence, exciting, stimulating, a mysterious and subliminal process, even for me."

This is a woman of great warmth, culture, intelligence, and charm — a woman who is clearly interested in those around her.

Her interests span the cultural spectrum from opera to flamenco dancing, from fashion to fiction.

For the last several years, she has been active with The Elmhurst Artists' Guild and currently is on its board of directors.

Her husband passed away seven years ago, so she now devotes even more time to both the Guild and to creating her expressive art.

She can often be found in the Artists' Guild's Gallery at the Elmhurst Art Museum, enjoying discussing the current exhibit and interacting with people. That is how I met her. You can, too!

Conrad Fischer School celebrates Lincoln's birthday

I had the opportunity to view interactive history first hand when Pat Moll, who is on the Park Board and also teaches 5th grade at Conrad Fischer School, invited me to see how the school celebrated Lincoln's birthday.

"All the grades were involved with the help of our tireless librarian, Donna Dewar," she said.

When I visited the school, Dewar was dressed like Lincoln and campaigning for president at the State Fair which was set up in the gym.

The first-graders wrote responses to a letter an 11-year-old girl wrote to Lincoln advising him to grow whiskers because they would enhance his sad, thin face and appeal to the voters.

The second-graders created a Lincoln portrait gallery complete with their renditions of Lincoln and his family throughout the years.

Pretzel log cabins and a timeline for Lincoln's life were the contributions of the third-graders, while the fourth-graders made an interactive quiz show the visiting classes could try and the fifth-graders wrote and enacted their own skits of parts of Lincoln's life.

There was also voting for the student who dressed as the most convincing Abe Lincoln. Now this is the way to learn history!