Creative Minds Matter, Artist Says : Culture: A busy painter lends her time to raise money for aspiring fashion designers.

This is not the time to throw out the arts, says Marina Day. “Our spirits need creativity. We need creative outlets.”

Day, who has lived in Los Angeles since the 1970s, can remember the pride she felt as a child at Greenwich Country Day School in Connecticut, where teachers would bind into a book the drawings by each first- and second-grader. At 16, she was selling her paintings in a gallery. But, in choosing a profession, she decided that “art was not as worthwhile as helping people.

“Not noble enough,” she adds. Instead, she went to Georgetown University and became a nurse. “Now I think humanity and the arts go together. They (together) are very healing.”

And because she believes young people will be creating the artistic images of the future, and because she believes “artists are the midwives of culture,” she is making time in her busy life to raise $500,000 for the Otis/Parsons School of Art and Design as co-chair of its critics awards fashion show Saturday at the Beverly Hilton.

At the benefit, Otis senior fashion majors will present their work. Each senior will have spent much of the year on an assignment from a major designer. For example, Bob Mackie presented the problem: Design evening attire for each month of the year.

Most of the proceeds will go to financial aid for students. “Last year, six of them didn’t have enough money to finish their senior year; the school found them funds,” Day says.

In addition, she points out, “a lot have to defend themselves with their families, in order to pursue their art.

“Our culture is not innately respectful of artists,” Day says. “We do not have the tradition of understanding the creative process. Few living artists are venerated.

“Yet, when you think of culture and look back in history, you do not necessarily remember the businessmen; you remember an age by the painters, the sculptors, the writers and the musicians.”

At 48, Marina Day, who is divorced, leads a nine-sided life. Sitting in her Venice studio, she picks up a pen and draws a tick-tack-toe diagram to explain it. In one square, she places children and family; in another, household; in another, health/exercise/diet; in another, art; in another, friends; in another, play; in another, education; in another, community. And in the center, she writes, “Quiet.”

At her Brentwood home, she shepherds the interests of two children--Joe, a Yale graduate who is a student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica, and Didi, a student at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, where Marina is a trustee. Home is also where she reads avidly, exercises and swims, and handles business.

And it’s where she writes in her journal every morning, a practice she has engaged in for 20 years. “I write my dreams, and sometimes I paint them,” she says.

Then there’s the life at her Venice studio. It’s filled with her paintings, including “Lion Love,” a large oil on vellum. The studio also is the place where she thinks, listens to music and finds quiet.

But she treasures her other interests. “The reason I am on the board at Mount St. Mary’s is because most of the students represent the first generation of their family to go to college.” She also works with alcoholic women, attends concerts and movies and is usually involved in “strengthening my mind with a class”--French or art.

“I try to have a balance in life.”