Art and Merry Making Collide in the Holidays

I carved out some time this week to get some work done in my studio while the boys were still in school and the full pressure of the holiday crunch had yet to set in.  My focus was on a willow piece, and I made wonderful progress on needle felting tree trunks.  I wrapped wires to create the branches using a mottled fleece combination of slate brown and cream colors.  The background is now also complete, which features a water structure that I created by crocheting together about twenty different yarns.  I like to use some silvery-sparkly threads to get the glistening effect of the midday sun on the water.  I crocheted a green peninsula into the piece to serve as a base for my willow on its own little patch of land.  Sometimes I feel this way about my more outlandish ideas, like I’m out on my own little peninsula trying to make things work out!  I have attached the willow to the background, but I still have to attach the dangling branches that will flesh out the tree.  The last touch will be to add some weathered rocks that we collected last summer from Topsail Island in North Carolina. 

 

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Dawn Adams and I went to see the latest exhibits at the Indiana University art museum.  One exhibit (Grand Allusions) was by an emeritus faculty names Robert Barnes.  These were large-scale narrative pieces perhaps four feet square each and loaded with visual information.  I was simply enchanted by the works.  The one striking feature that connected many individual pieces was the use of a brilliant red color.  Earlier in the week Dawn had invited me to go to a noon talk at the art museum where the speaker discussed the idea of amulets created from natural materials, which inspired me to re-imagine my own earth pieces and design a new composition (Amulets for the Earth) for my ‘From the Earth’ exhibition for next year.  But as I sat and listened I kept looking at the artwork around me and was drawn back into the brilliant reds hanging around me.  The color had been haunting me to the point where it had to come out in some form.  I interrupted my willow piece to do something crafty, kind of like eating some salty potato chips when you know you should be eating salad—there was an immediate craving I had to satisfy.  Because I’m also focused on the Christmas season I made two wreaths.  The first included the ‘Barnes’ red, while the second one blazes with it.  Now that I’ve finished the second one I’ll get back to my willow. 

The big family project for the week is home decoration for Christmas.  The boys are hugely enthusiastic to tackle this, having already put a tree and lights around their room.  They put on jingly elf garb, played Christmas carols and started decorating.  The tree was the target for yesterday.  They put up all the ornaments collected over the years, so it’s fun for me to pull them out and remember the stories around them.  Next on the agenda is cookie baking for the boys and stollen for me (yes, spellchecker, I mean stollen—I’d wrest an umlaut from you too if I could, Microsoft!). 

 Grandma tells me every year that she doesn’t care if the house is clean or if anything else is on the menu, but we must have stollen (two kinds) for Christmas morning breakfast.  As I sat and enjoyed my Sunday morning espresso (thanks Jim!) and read the newspaper, I came across a big image of my work from the Convention Center exhibit (thanks Herald Times!).  The only thing that was missing was pie.  I hear raspberry goes well with the holidays!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

A quiet week

I’ve had a bag of unused wool in the back of my mind for a while. Actually, it lived in my art studio in a brown bag, and this week it needed some attention. The Spinners and Weaver’s Guild members held a secret fiber exchange at a meeting before summer break. Each recipient was tasked with making something out of their secret material. I received a bag of superwash wool in a beautiful blue color with hints of purple and green. The premise behind superwash wool is that it can be put through the washer and dryer because it doesn’t felt (and therefore won’t shrink). I didn’t know if I could needle felt with it but I wanted to try. I decided to try to make an object I’ve never done before, so I set off to make a bowl. I began with an old blanket and cut it in the shape of a doughnut, two layers thick. If you imagine the doughnut as a pie (I think of everything as pie) and cut out a generous slice, that’s what I did to the material. I stitched the edges back together to create the basic bowl shape and started to needle felt the wool. It worked out surprisingly well. I did the inner surface first, then I needle felted a swirly pattern on the surface using a soft lavender yarn. I’ll be working on coating the outer surface last so that I don’t have the pattern showing through. I’ll see if I can complete it before the first guild meeting of the fall on Monday.

The weather was just gorgeous this week in Bloomington, so I took the opportunity to do a little work outside. That meant puttying, sanding and painting the oak frames that my friend Tom Bertolacini builds for me. It’s nice to be outside when it isn’t too hot (most of the summer), or too cold (a few days the week before), or too wet. Now I have twelve black frames ready to be filled. I know it’s time to start weaving again, but I need a break after a long summer of creating, traveling and selling. My family and I went to the farmer’s market Saturday for our usual stock-up on fruit and veggies, which was also a nice break. It’s a great time for the market with all the late-season goodies. We found watermelon, corn, raspberries, cucumbers, apples and a big bag of peppers for a peppered salmon dish. I also got an inspiration for a new piece when I chatted with Sarah at the volunteer fair. She is involved with the Bloomington orchard project. I thought they had mainly apple trees, but I learned that they have a huge variety of fruits. I’m excited to tour the grove and see what’s going on. I did learn that they’ve been preventing the trees from bearing fruit until they become bigger and well established. The concept of a huge new harvest of all different kind of fruits got me thinking about and sketching a whimsical tree covered with all the fruits in the orchard. I need to think a little about the structure to get the scale right, but now I’m excited again to start a new piece.

I went on lots of little forays this week—I went back to Auto Heaven to forage for rusty car parts and came back with a big bucket of stuff. Tommie and I went to the train racks by the B-line trail and came home with a big bag of treasures, including some old spark plugs, which I think are cool. Everything is carefully washed and dried and waiting in a big plastic jar and so I’m ready to begin a commission similar to my ‘Tread Lightly’ composition that sold quickly at Fourth Street.

On Thursday the boys and I went to an exhibit at the John Waldron arts center to see an exhibit of Turkish textiles put on by George Malacinski. The exhibit, entitled "Woven Treasures: Near- and Middle-Eastern Textiles" was amazing, featuring a combination of interesting techniques, materials, colors and effects. Perhaps the most amazing was a horse bridle that had a felted structure stitched onto a woven fabric with an embroidered surface. I saw a wedding dress that was both beautiful and sad. It featured an extraordinary silk fabric embroidered with silk—you could see that it represented a phenomenal amount of work. The mixed feelings come from the knowledge that the marriage was arranged for a young girl whose body was not allowed to show. Her arms were bound underneath and covered with the beautiful dress, and she was married as a commodity and not a person.

Oh, a couple of quick final notes. My two big commission pieces were shown in Saturday’s Herald Times Homes section when Carol Krause wrote a piece and photographed them for an article about the homeowners renovations. That was nice to see. And even though we got raspberries, there won’t be enough for a pie this week. I’m still optimistic that something with a crust will turn up soon! It’s fall apple time, and there are still plenty of peaches around! Is anybody listening? Jim?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Holiday week 2, the sequel...

What a full week! The holiday season is winding down, with only one houseguest left. Grandma and Aunt Lois flew home on Monday, and Vojta heads back to LA tomorrow afternoon. We tried to fatten him up a little on Kluski, flatbread, salmon and American beer and chocolate, but it’s hard to see the effects. He and I drove out to Sheep Street this week to bond a little and pick up my new drum carder. I’ve been borrowing the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild carder, but it’s clear I needed my own when I got into my big-format commission piece. It was a win-win situation: he got to take a lot of pictures of the Indiana countryside for his picture-hungry grandfather Pepik, and I got my shiny new carder with all its teeth. We shared a nice conversation in Czech on the way. I’ll christen the carder with some carrot orange fleece—I can’t wait to get carding! I even managed to sneak down to my art studio a few mornings and evenings when the world was quiet and do some weaving. I laid down my browns yarns and did some serious dirt creation to grow carrots and beets. Oh, and I enlisted Tommie to help with a big year-end yarn organization project. His brother got a Beyblade for Christmas, and he wanted one too. To earn a little extra cash he offered to organize a giant bag of mixed yarns. I couldn’t imagine when I’d get around to organizing it, so I beyond delighted to have the help. It feels great to start the New Year off with an organized art studio.

Wednesday was a big day in our house, since it was my birthday! I turned 35, again. I got a nice pan-seared tuna dinner with a spinach salad and a special bottle of wine. And since I got to pick the kind of cake for dessert, which is a family tradition. I chose—you guessed it—pie! Jim made a delightful apple pie for me from frozen Mutsu apples we got at the farmer’s market last summer. Yum! He’s really got the oil crust recipe down. I’ve had a slice of pie and an espresso for breakfast the last couple of days after Zumba. Life is good! The only down side was that the photographer for the Herald Times was scheduled to stop by Thursday morning to take a few pictures. That meant a lot of cleaning and picking up after a big dinner and wine—we should have planned that out better. In the end, just about all the pictures Pete the photographer took were taken in the art studio and the surrounding storage areas. All that work cleaning in the kitchen, living room and dining room were misdirected, although we do have a clean house. On the bright side, Jacob did ask if Pete would take some pictures in his newly cleaned up room. We got a family portrait, including Shadow the hamster, on Jacob’s bed at the end of the shoot. The article and pictures should appear in the February Home and Living magazine that is published by the Herald-Times newspaper, so watch your mailboxes. In my case, I’ll watch the puddle at the end of the driveway where our delivery person aims every time it rains.

The last stories I can think to tell involve Vojta, our 20-year-old cousin and guest from Prague via Los Angeles. We had pleasant Skype conversations with grandparents Pepik and Mila, and later Renata (his mom), this week. They all wanted to know what we’d be doing for New Year’s Eve. In our house New Year’s Eve usually means going to bed early. They were shocked! Shocked I say! Renata said they stayed out to seven a.m. last year, yikes! If there’s any reward to being, um, 35, it’s that you can go to bed early if you want to. Renata said that that Vojta was expecting fireworks, and he injected ‘giant fireworks’. I magnanimously offered him a sparker. Heck, I’d have given him two if he’d asked. Instead, for fireworks we went to the IU women’s basketball game against Northwestern. Unlike the last men’s game, when we sat so high up that the little oxygen masks dropped down during emergencies, we got to sit in the third row near center court. It was like we were in the game. The finish was intense, with IU pulling out a hard-fought and well-earned win. We even won a free Buccettos pizza in a give-away at the game, so a good time was had by all.

That’s enough for 2010, I suppose. Vojta flies back to LA today and the boys head back to school tomorrow. The Christmas tree ornaments went back into storage today and the tree hits the recycle truck on Monday morning. And then I become an artist again!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin