Harbingers, Herons and Fishing

The great blue heron is done!  And Jim and Tommie got to go fishing, so spring is off to a good start.  I’ve been working on my heron piece for several months, and it’s just so fun to have all of the pieces finally come together.  The hanging willow branches seen in the foreground were made months ago.  Each leaf is attached to the main branch by a thin chartreuse vein.  The technique I used for this takes me back about fifteen years when I was first starting out in fiber art.  

I came across a spool of thin wire wrapped with a thread of green that I thought was crazy—I would never do anything like that!  Still, I saved the spool for a special use.  Unfortunately, the green was not quite right for my piece, so I had to wrap my own material.  I discovered it’s really not that hard to make, it just looks crazy. 

Spring is finally here and I’m feeling happy. The winter hasn’t felt as horrible to me as many of my friends have said or posted.  I think that’s because I spent so much time in my art studio this year.  

I don’t know if it’s the broad spectrum lighting or the fact that I’ve been creating art every day, but I just don’t feel as exhausted as in years past.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m tickled to have spring here, and I’m certainly celebrating with more spring pieces.  That brings me to my current piece, which is called ‘Harbingers of Spring’.  It will feature a cheerful Robin and several clumps of dandelions, traditional signs of the season changing.  Speaking of robins, I can’t believe how many we have this year!  It just seems like a bumper crop. 

It feels as if I’m avoiding more robins than squirrels when I’m driving these days.  Lately I’ve been working on the individual dandelion leaves.  I figure that I need to have four to five leaves per clump and roughly three clumps, so I have a few more to make.  I struggled a little with getting the proportions right when I needle felted the robin, but I’m pleased with how it turned out. 

I do still have a deadline looming for my exhibit called:  “Migration:  where have you been and what have you seen?”  I’m hoping to include my robin piece in that show as part of fifteen new pieces in the big reveal.  It will be fun to see them all together and have closure on my migrating animals project.  The exhibition will hang at the BPP (Bloomington Playwrights Project) into June, through their performances of “The Jedi Handbook” and “To Quiet the Quiet”.  Stop by and see a performance and the fiber art!

My big project on Friday was retrieving Tommie from Oberlin.  I set out at six a.m. with an espresso under clear skies in Bloomington.  It turned into a harrowing drive through rain, falling slush, hail and white-out snow conditions through western Indiana and Ohio.  I persevered and got my little pumpkin.  It was nice to meet up on campus with great aunt Marian and Uncle Paul and have lunch at Aladdinin Oberlin.  By the way, they make amazing pita pizzas.  My favorite is the Farm that is loaded with raw spring vegetables.  We got our hugs and hit the road again after a nice visit.  The weather turned nicer, with blue skies and puffy clouds all the way home.  It’s wonderful to have my family together again, even for a few days.  And yes, Jim did get to go fishing with Tommie.  It wasn’t a great day, with high, murky cold water.  Still, they launched the canoe and fished where they could and caught just a few crappies they released.  On the other hand, I suspect that my heron didn’t catch many either. 

And hooray, it was another pie week!  It seems like the fruit gods dropped a huge load of inexpensive blackberries on Bloomington this past week, so a nice blackberry pie appeared.  Yum.  I have one slice remaining until the hourglass timer gets flipped over and the sands reverse direction. 

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Life’s path finds its home.

My past few weeks have been a roller coaster ride through a series of art and family events.  My big commission piece, ‘Life’s Path,’ is now complete and hanging in its new location, the Like Law Group’s reception area.  I just love how it looks against the orange background.  A lot of long hours went into completing the piece, which makes it all the more satisfying to see it hanging on the wall. 

 I immediately launched into my next commission, which also features a path.  This time the focus will be on the trees rather than the path.  Because my patron wants to hang it in a hallway it will have to be a flatter piece.  My trees can be a little feisty, and I don’t want them accosting anyone as they walk down the hall.  The challenge will be rely more on color to help create the perception of depth.  Of course the size of the objects in the piece conveys depth, so I’ll incorporate different sized elements such as crinoids to contribute to the depth aspect.  Fortunately, I have an extensive collection of found objects, sorted by size, so I’m already working the fossils into my piece.  As I’m moving this project forward, I’m also preparing for the next commissioned piece.  This is the time of year when I can catch up on requests for pieces I’ve received through all the summer art fairs, so you’ll be seeing these pieces come together over the next few weeks.  

 Next up is a version of my ‘Some Like it Hot’ piece that featured dozens of peppers.  The layout will be different, with the new piece a being narrower, taller version of the original.  The patron requested that I include some purple peppers, so I stopped in to visit the pepper lady at the Bloomington Farmer’s market on Saturday.  I bought a few purple peppers to get the color right.  A couple of days later I visited Yarns Unlimited and found some Corriedale fleece that was just the perfect match to my peppers.  

Along with the actual artwork, I’ve had several other projects to keep moving forward.  I’ve been creating felted balls in the dryer to use for fruits and vegetables, such as the larger peppers and some lemons that will appear in another piece down the road.  When the weather turned warm and clear, that was my signal to start finishing frames for the pieces.  I need to have the temperature above and the humidity below certain thresholds to stain or paint.  I need to get a bunch of frames painted before the cooler, wetter weather of fall blows in.  

The big family news of the week was the visit of Grandma (Jim’s mom) for the long weekend.  Friday was fall break for the school system and IU, so Grandma stopped by to play with us.  She told us the story of her family having raspberry pie for New Year’s Day with fresh whipped cream when she was a child.  While there are still raspberries around at the farmer’s market, we weren’t there early enough to claim a pie-worthy number.  Luckily, Jim froze a batch for pie filling a few weeks back and he baked one on Sunday morning.  Yum!  We’re going to need to get up early on Saturday and scavenge enough for another wintertime pie.   

Grandma went everywhere we did on the weekend, including out collecting fossils with the family.  Tommie is working on an independent study project for his science class, where he wanted to collect geodes from two locations and compare the crystal structures inside.  Of course it’s just a lot of fun to collect geodes and smash them open, so it doesn’t feel like work.  The report is written and the powerpoint presentation is done, we’re told, with two weeks to spare.  We’ll have to inspect it for grammar and completeness, but I’m delighted that he took the initiative and did it all on his own.   

On the collecting trip, we all climbed down into the river bottoms, including Jim’s mom at (very close to) 80.  She was a trouper, helping to find crinoids and small, opened geodes for Martina as Tommie did his thing.  We fed her a nice fish dinner for her troubles.  In fact, we ate pretty well while she was here!

Last, I wanted to mention a delightful adults-only date I had last Saturday.  Jim and I went to the Uptown for a nice dinner with a bottle of wine.  After the show we walked up Walnut to the Bloomington Playwright’s Project to see "Rx."  The staging was really impressive (great job again, Chad!).  Many of the actors were from Ivy Tech, so I even knew some of them.  The best performer was the woman who played the drug company manager.  She truly brought the character to life.  In fact, I’m sure I met her at a scientific conference several years back when I was still a scientist.  The whole evening was delightful.   

The only bad news from the week was the realization that summer is giving way to fall.  My first show comes up on November 9^th, which is the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild show at the First United Church onThird Street - yup, it's a picture of my piece, Summer Salad in full colour!!  The Déjà vu and Unitarian Universalist Bazaar shows can’t be far behind.  Yikes!  What did happen to summer!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Under the weather…

I was sick…which means I completed less than I had hoped this week. I even missed Zumba for two days. The good news is that even when you’re sick you can still needle felt. I spent a big chunk of time creating aggressive writing pens for my BPP commission piece, and I had a pretty good time doing it. I was again reminded that there is nothing to watch on daytime television. Oh, and if being sick wasn’t enough, it rained much of the week. I feel as if we’ve been soggy for months, even though it’s only been a couple of weeks. I slogged through my soggy days, though, and I diligently finished the hand for the piece and its big yellow letters. By late in the week I started assembling the piece. The exciting part was when I could see that it was really coming together. The finishing touches involved needle felted the logo onto the background in cursive text, followed by attaching the 3D yellow BPP letters I made last week. They were connected using wires that allow the letters to float over the piece. The finishing bit was attaching the aggressive pens and the writing hand. The final piece is very dimensional, so I decided to make a movie of the piece that captures the topography. A flat photograph is just too flat! When my health started to return I delivered it to the BPP to warm reviews. Check it out in its new home sometime!

The skies on Saturday morning broke clear and blue. I woke to sunshine and knew it was time to make our first trip to the Farmer’s market this year. I thought that if I could find rhubarb there would be a pie in my future. Sadly, though, I had to settle for a nice breakfast and a flat of vegetable seedlings that Tommie wanted to plant in his garden. To my surprise, Tommie volunteered to read one page from the book “James and the Giant Peach” as part of the library’s project to read the whole book over a span of four hours using hundreds of local readers. He did a great job and made his parents proud. I’m looking forward to reliving the experience when it’s broadcast (and rebroadcast on CATS).

In the afternoon we stopped in at the Sahara Mart wine tasting event. Jim drove, I sampled and he took tasting notes. If the wine had some special characteristic I let him take a tiny sip, but not too much. I ended up trying 24 different wines! It really only amounted to a glass or so, with a sadly large amount thrown away. Jim decided that I must have looked knowledgeable at the table of a French wine importer, because he pulled out a bottle of Chateau neuf du Pape from underneath the table for me to try. Yum! We ended up picking up a few extra bottles for the wine cellar. That made Jim happy. Two of them even came from Slovakia, which made me happy. One was a Muskat Moravsky 2007 Reserve, a white wine that I really liked. We’ll have it with a mild fish under a garlic topping sometime soon. The second was called Frankovska Modra (2003), which was an earthy red wine. I think it will be nice with spicy food that has some strong character. We vegetarians don’t get the benefits of having wine with grilled meats. I’m secretly hoping that some of my Czech or Slovak relatives will add a comment or two if they’ve tried the wines before and have an opinion. About the wines, that is. I’ll let everyone know when the wines move from the cellar to the table and I can try them with food.

That’s about it for the week. I’m remembering my father’s birthday today. His birthday flowers, the magnolias, are finished, but I saw the first poppies on First Street, smelled the first wisteria of the season, and tomorrow is our biennial spring egg hunt. It would be the Easter egg hunt, but candy goes on sale big time after Easter, so I buy it up in bulk and the boys stuff hundreds of recycled plastic eggs for the hunt. Now we just need one more day of blue sky and dry soil! Think good thoughts for us!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Ratatouille is the first to leave the sinking ship

I began this week reveling in the late stages of completing my major art pieces, "Summer Harvest" and "Ratatouille." My photographer, Tom Bertolacini, came over to take photographs for my portfolio. He sets up all his fancy lights and gets out his fancy camera and takes some really nice pictures. Even better, though, is the fact that I brought the pieces upstairs when he was done! That’s important because two major storms passed through Bloomington on Friday. The second one woke us up around midnight when the tornado sirens went off. We trundled two sleepy boys into the basement studio, with blankets and pillows, and they lay down there. Fortunately, we got to see the window well filled up with water and watch the water start to pour in. By that time the tornado sirens were off and Jim ran out to scoop water out of the well. Then he used the push broom to sweep water out of the veranda and direct it into Celerin Pond which drains into Drummond Creek. That kept a lot of water out of the house, but enough came in to the storage room that I had to jump into defense mode. I cleared the wall storage units and rolled up the carpets in my art studio to let everything dry out. Nothing was damaged, but it kept us up until 3:30. Saturday we did a little drainage remodeling around the veranda and resolved to remove the stone patio that channels the water toward the house. Ah, spring in Indiana—I love it! I just love some parts more than others. A post script here—I could do without the ant invasions too.

This week I began weaving away on my BPP (Bloomington Playwrights Project) commission piece. The structural challenge was incorporating one key aspect of their logo, which is the “turning pages” at the bottom right hand corner on all their promotional stuff. Chad asked if I could somehow incorporate that feature into the piece. I imagined a strategy that I thought might work, but this week I did the experiment. Basically I wove three weavings, and into each of the first wefts I incorporated some used baling wire wrapped with yarn which also continued up the right side of the weaving. I then wove the rest of the weaving. I was able to create a tiered set of weavings and stretched them out on the frame. I snipped away the support strings on the corners and molded the wires outward to create the turning pages. During my travels I’ve been poking at the BPP logo letters. I’ve enjoyed working on crisp edges that don’t have the organic feel that my felted vegetables had. While I like doing natural things, the freshness of doing something new is welcome. To make the letters I used an old wool army blanket that belonged to Jim’s father. I cut six layers out for each letter and stitched them together. I needle felted my tumeric-dyed fleece on top of the blanket letters. Because I want to the letters appear to be suspended in front of the weaving I also incorporated baling wire into the back of the letters to create the look of floating letters. Overall, I feel really good about the progress I made on the piece, and next week I’ll should launch on to the cursive text of their logo, ‘Where theatre is born’. The piece will feature a hand holding a pen, which I’ve already completed and think it looks really good.

I’m sure I did other things this week—I’m a little short on sleep, which doesn’t help my memory. I do remember lunch with my sweetie this Thursday at Malibu Grill. I had the farmed perch from Bell’s in Muncie Indiana, which were really tasty. I had no idea that there were perch in Indiana—I’ve only enjoyed the perch from the great lakes. Jim made kluski for dinner last night, and it was especially good. Even so, after all the wetness and woe I had this week you’d think I might deserve another pie! My friend Wendy got one…but I think that she made that one herself...

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Ratatouille Arrives!

Finally—‘Ratatouille’ is complete! I’m delighted with how it turned out. I even feel as if I’ve taken the first step toward being a grandma by carrying around pictures of the completed piece and showing the people who have watched me along the way. I received so much support and encouragement as I felted tomato slices, eggplants, zucchini and herb leaves into existence over the past few months that I felt I needed to share the finished product. It has been fun to watch their responses to seeing the finished piece. The people who actually saw the size of the tomatoes have the best sense of the overall magnitude of the finished piece, which is huge 5' X 2 1/2 '—the tomatoes are the size of dinner plates. Even though I like the tomatoes, my favorite part of the piece is the basil leaves. I feel like they really enhance the cohesiveness of the piece, and I just like how they turned out. I can almost smell the piece!

Did I say I was pleased with how it turned out? That’s true, but I am sooo ready to move beyond creating vegetables. At the end of the week I devoted big blocks of time to my next piece, a signature piece for the Bloomington Playwright’s Project. If you’ve seen their aggressive writing tools on the attack you know the basic design. In my version the background is purple and the BPP letters are a bright yellow. That means I spent some time digging through my yarn boxes to find just the colors I needed. I was on a spring and birth mind set (their motto is "where theater is born") and so I chose a purple that reminds me of the Johnny Jump-Up violets in the lawn, mixed in with their shockingly bright yellow dandelion friends. I bought the yellow fleece at the Fiber Arts show from Donna Jo Copeland last November. It was dyed with tumeric to produce a brilliant, almost neon yellow, which is amazing considering that it comes from a natural dye. The yellow letters have a crispness that I’m enjoying, especially after focusing on organic vegetable shapes for the past few months. And weaving, finally weaving, in my art studio has been a delight. While I enjoy needle felting, there’s a certain rhythm to weaving that I’ve missed. The piece will feature a hand, which I’ve completed, holding an angry pen, ready to create a great play. I just need to adjust the length of the wrist, and make the pen.

The fact that it’s officially spring means the dandelions are commandeering the local lawns. I had the boys out collecting dandelion heads for dyeing later this summer. I even spent fifteen minutes this morning mowing down the yellow flowers in the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and road. I should have enough for a good dye pot. I’ve got to replenish some of my color stocks, which also led me to the big Fiber Event in Greencastle this past Friday. It’s one of the highlights of my year. I went with my friend Ruth, which made for a delightful trip. We chitty chatted the whole time, making it feel as if we made it there in ten minutes. I had a wonderful conversation with a weaver and natural material dyer from Nashville who sold fair traded spun banana silk yarn—that will probably make it’s way into a scarf this fall. We talked about some of her recent adventures in dyeing, and she showed me some yarn and fleece that she had dyed with wild rose clippings using iron mordant. It got me eyeing the wild rose in our back yard that I don’t really like because it scratches the whole family as they bring bikes through the gate into the back yard. We talked about using invasive plants for dyeing, which made me wonder about using euonymous as a green dye. That evil vine has taken over big parts of the back garden beds, and it’s heading for a major haircut this summer. I’ll do some experiments with added alum and varying conditions, but I’m sure I’ll find a use for any material that survives the dye pot.

The last bit of news from the week has to do with one of my favorite foods—pie! A rhubarb pie appeared yesterday morning. Although it came from frozen rhubarb because no fresh stalks could be found, it tasted great and the crust came out as a crumbly delight. Yippee! I’ll have pie and espresso for breakfast after Zumba all week!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Summertime tomatoes, sliced and ready

Last week was nothing short of hot in Bloomington, so I knew it was clearly time for tomatoes. The little red fruits just filled my world. I poked and created slice after slice of juicy summertime heaven at every meeting and event I attended, and all day when the boys were in school. My payoff, sadly, wasn’t a fresh tomato sandwich. It was even better! I finished off the last of the tomatoes, and indeed the last of my vegetables, for my ‘Ratatouille’ piece! I can’t tell you how good that feels after months of felting giant carrots, onions, and beets (for the Summer Harvest companion piece) followed by eggplant, onions, herbs, zucchinis and tomatoes for the Ratatouille piece. What a giant relief to have all the pieces (and backgrounds) in my art studio.

My week in tomato town started with buying and slicing open a selection of Roma tomatoes as models. Most artists can’t get away with slicing open their models to get a look at the internal structures, but happily I can. What struck me when I examined the tomatoes was how variable the tomatoes are with respect to the internal chambers. I assumed they would all have the same developmental program that produced the same chamber structure. Then to make the seeds I was looking for some muted earthy yellow color. Fortunately, I came across fleece that I had dyed this summer with goldenrod flowers collected in Michigan. I did one batch with just the flowers and a second with alum added. The former gave a more muted yellow that was perfect for my seeds. I’m always delighted when something I can’t imagine finding a home for turns out to be just the right color for a future project. I needle felted the seeds in place after the tomato slice took shape, then I gave them a light blanket of the slimy tomato chamber material and then felted more seeds on top. I felt the technique gave a sense of depth to the seeds within the seed chamber that I really liked.

Of course finishing the components means it’s time to assemble components onto the weaving background. I stayed up fairly late last night, enjoying the cool of the basement art studio over the stuffy upstairs bedrooms after an eighty-degree day. I decided to put together ‘Summer Harvest’ first. I really like it! I just feels soooo good to have it assembled after months of creating small pieces and working through the doubt of whether it will all work out. I even found a use for the orange thread from Jim’s youth, which he used to tie spawn bags to catch trout. Everything finds a use in my house! As the piece came together we broke out a bottle of wine to celebrate. Now I just need to decide on the exact component layout for ‘Ratatouille’ and assemble that piece.

Everything else in my world took a back seat to art last week, but I did get out a little. The opening reception for “The Art of Re-Use” in celebration of Earth Day in Columbus, IN organized by Marilyn Brackney, was Thursday evening at Hotel Indigo. I left all three boys home and drove over with Cappi Phillips. The trip seemed like it only took ten minutes because we laughed and giggled just about the whole way. The reception was well attended, and I even ran into one of the judges from the first Déjà Vu show. She also happened to have bought a Winter Birches piece. Now she’s doing amazing encaustic pieces. I’ve been oohing and aahhing over the technique ever since we saw a demonstration of the art form at Wonderlab.

Over the weekend the whole crew went out to the African American Dance Company’s spring performance, which was excellent. I loved seeing such immense talent in all the different body shapes and ethnic backgrounds. Some of the movements seemed almost snake-like to me, which got into my head. I tried to think and move like a snake when I was doing Zumba the next day. We also managed to get out to the Sunday matinee performance of Miles Away at the Bloomington Playwrights Project – a date with hubby! The acting was intense and at the end I just sat in sort of a stunned silence for a bit to pull myself back into my own reality. The characters and plot were far removed from what I experience day-to-day, but I felt completely embraced in the experience because of the incredible acting. Thanks to Chad for assembling an amazing out of body experience. Go see it!

This will be another big week—completing ‘Ratatouille’ will certainly be an early major project. I’m a little nervous about it still, but I’m optimistic about the final product. I also noticed, ahem, that our rhubarb was starting to poke up in the garden. Hmmm, let’s see…spring, rhubarb…could a pie be far behind? Check back next week!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin