Teenage refugee, two-time cancer survivor, enthusiastic art collector — at the age of 78, Marta Blades has lived a full life.

It’s a life that is boldly on display in the art and objects she has acquired and collected over her lifetime — a collection that informed her loft’s interior design.

It’s also a personal aesthetic honed by years of working in the visual arts, a value system that defines Blades’ sense of beauty, grace, and comfort. “Everything tells a story,” says the consummate storyteller.

Awarded a scholarship to study art at Marian College in Indianapolis, Blades immigrated to America from Hungary at the age of 18. “I’m
a refugee — a first-generation American who came over on the big boat,” Blades says.

Her affinity for objects and images of the iconic Statue of Liberty commemorate that defining moment in her life and embody the spirit of a woman who has beaten cancer twice and brightened the world with her own eternal flame of hope. From the study of art to the study of journalism, Blades was destined to tell her stories with the voice and vocabulary of a visual artist.

As a professional art director with Editions Limited Gallery in Indianapolis, Blades devoted herself to a life of learning to look — of learning to see. She says she knows that the wonderful thing about art is that it need not be constrained by anything more than personal aesthetic: “Wow, I like that! Now, where in my home can I place that for all my friends and family to see?” Suddenly you’re engaged. You’re thinking about how to share the story. That’s the fun and the beauty of learning to see, she explains.

Blades muses that living with art feels very different from living with other kinds of furnishings. It can inspire pleasure, confusion, or an immediate sense of affinity. You may like what you’re looking at, or you may not. Either way, your eye is stimulated, and the piece calls to you for response and reaction.

If it’s true then that art encountered in life occasionally calls for response and reaction, then it may also be said that life sometimes calls for response and reaction in art.

Not surprisingly, during her most recent fight with cancer, Blades turned her discerning eye inward and responded with a series of canvases entitled HOPE. These are by far the most personal pieces in her collection, rivaled only by those created for her — like favorite artist Paul Wandless’ Healing angel hanging in the living room, painted for Blades at the same time. 

Today, she shares her “swanky new pad” with her cat, Savannah, and her dog, Jack. Their “1,500 square feet of heaven” has been featured on Piedmont Craftsmen’s annual downtown loft tour and recently garnered an honorable mention from Metropolitan Home magazine for its chic urban look — just one of the rewards of a lifetime of learning to see.

For this artist and collector, the art of living life, if not just surviving it, has clearly been carried out with the boldest of brush strokes and should be cause for us all to have hope.