The best fork for pie!

We are finally deep into spring and looking towards summer.  The trees are leafing out into soft greens, the redbuds are on full display and the dogwoods are just about to burst.  The farmer’s market is underway, and I’m looking forward to one of my favorite things about summer:  the fresh fruits and vegetables!  I’m sure that people all over the world feel the same way after eating winter fruits that were picked early and lack the rich flavors of summer.  To celebrate that approaching yumminess just around the corner I just finished a weaving called "Twelve Forks of Summer."  

I had a lot of fun collecting the forks themselves.  Some are silver and others regular flatware that I painted and patinaed to enhance the unique features of each pattern.  I intentionally painted them all gold to elevate the perception of the object.  Traditionally, objects placed in and around gold are elevated in value.  A perfect piece of watermelon deserves to be on a regal gold fork. 

I also started work on a fun piece that came to me while I was in Michigan staying with Dawn’s friends Angela and Rick.  Angela shared with me her vintage salesman’s display box of shaving tools that she inherited from her mother, which is an image that stayed in my head.  That sparked a memory of a scrounging adventure with Nancy last summer at the Westbury Antique Market’s yard sale, where I found a fascinating old gold razor.  

That had me thinking about musicals like Music Man and costumes, and all together you might understand how I came up with one the next pieces I’ll make called "Barbershop Quartet."  It will feature vintage shaving devices embedded in a barbicide-blue background.  On the foreground will be attached four goldfinches singing in unison.  I warped the loom with silver because many of the barber tools will be silver.  I have already collected many of the things that will go into the weaving and I’ve started to work on the goldfinches with different vocal ranges.  I’m excited because it’s going to be a fun piece, but it also reminds me about all the places I’ve been and the friends I was with when I collected the objects.  Thanks Dawn, Nancy, Charlotte, Angela, Grandma, and Jacob—and Jim for your patience while I scrounge through the oddest places! 

I apologize for missing a couple of weeks of blogging, but I’ve been on the road.  In early April I participated at the Ridgeland Fine Art Festival in Mississippi.  It was a wonderful success—I’m tickled that three of my pieces found new homes.  The people responded warmly to my art and I’m excited to put it on my list of shows to apply for next year.  

We stayed with cousins Martha and Dave, and they took such good care of us.  We finally got to meet Amy and Harold, whom we’ve heard about for years.  Amy Head is a make-up icon in the south and has the eye of a visual artist.  We had wonderful conversations about the impacts of color and layering colors.  I wished we lived closer.  As we drove south we left the earliest beginnings of Spring in Indiana and gradually watched as we drove through the blossoming forsythia, redbuds, dogwoods and into the flowering wisteria in Mississippi, where everything was fully leafed out. 

My next weekend involved a drive north to Chicago with the Sounds of South, which was the reverse weather experience.  

We left the beginnings of spring to remember the cold and snow of winter.  The trip was warmed by the people and the performances we saw, including seeing Hamilton and A Chorus Line.  The Chicago performance of Hamilton was spectacular, like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  The staging was crisp, unexpected and engaging.  Combined with outstanding performances the effect was spellbinding.  This was the first musical I emerged ready to take in again.  It was just an extravagant visual display.  Walking around Chicago and eating foods we don’t find in Bloomington was a fabulous experience in and of itself.  

The Sounds of South kids sang in a church, and the performance was a feast for the ears because the acoustics in the church was amazing.  The right setting always brings a new dimension to choral singing.  The faces on the kids truly were engaged in what they were doing, making the performance powerful and the memory one of those bubbles in your brain that you tap into when you need to conjure a feeling of joy. 

The best part of traveling is returning home. I was delighted to return from Chicago to discover a warm, blackberry pie.  Jim was experimenting and did something magical.  The fruits were intact and the flavors were bright, so it was unexpectedly delicious.  He’s a pie magician. 

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Making mini Martinas…

I’m wearing three hats this week!  The first is my needle felting hat.  I had so much fun last fall creating the needle felted vegetable and fruit collage pieces that I decided to scale down to make individual felted pieces.  Each fruit and vegetable really is its own mini artwork full of visual information, detail and interest.  Some are symmetrical, others are not, and often the subject brings vibrant colors.  I’m now thinking about my fruits and vegetables as small tiles that can be combined for display.   

The project fits with my fall life because Saturday mornings revolve around trips to the farmer’s market—yesterday was a three-bag haul, with lettuce, apples, garlic, peppers and more.  There is such a bounty of the harvest on display in rich, warm fall colors.  The vegetable haul mirrors the social experience, seeing lots of friends and regulars.  Marina at Le Petit Café becomes a regular fall connection with special hot chocolate and coffees for the family, and Maria from Piccoli Dolci often provides a special treat.  The man who sells us jam and jellies knows that our teenage boys eat through whatever we buy (and hence will be back).  The farmer who saved a huge bag of onion skins for me thought I was a little crazy, but they proved to be the perfect source for the dye to create an accurate onion skin color.  The whole Saturday morning adventure just fits so well with my art. 

My second hat is a wet felting hat. Not that I’m felting hats!  I had a fabulous experience a couple of weeks ago in Fredericksburg, starting with a workshop by Pamela MacGregor and continuing with Elizabeth Woodford, that started me thinking about wet felting vessels.  I’m now playing with different fibers and experimenting with new techniques.  I really want to be able to create textures and then embed objects into my vessels, much like my weavings where I create underground scenes. That way you’re encasing memories and stories in the vessels.  At this point, though, I need to sort out the techniques first.  That’s about the time when my science background kicks in.  I started by creating flat felt circles and embedded various yarns (synthetics, wools, sisal and felt balls).  I learned a lot from my first piece and launched into creating a few simple vessels.

My third hat is maintaining and tweaking costumes for Pippin costumes and props.  The big performance at Bloomington High School South starting October 15^th and running for two more weeks on Saturday nights.  You can order tickets here. The costumes themselves are finished, but those darn kids keep growing!  Final adjustments are in order so the costumes fit perfectly on the night of the performance.  Watching the rehearsals over the summer has been revealing, because socks slowly appear as legs grow longer while the pants do not.  Come see Tommie, who is Charlemagne in the first two performances (October 15 and 22), while Jacob is a magician in all of the shows.  I’m looking forward to seeing the visual spectacle as my art pieces dance around the stage!  Oh, and I’ve heard that the kids might sing too :)

The big news in my workshop world is that I'll be doing another workshop - next month - in Crawfordsville, IN.  If you are interested in participating, please contact the event organizer, Jessica Madsen at jdpmadsen@gmail.com  It will be a one day workshop on Saturday November 12, from 9:30am - 5:50pm.

 And on the family front, we’ve been taking in some theater of late. Last Friday we saw BPP’s ‘30 Days of Mourning’ that featured Steve Scott (aka the boy’s taekwondo instructor) Paul Kuhne (an amazing actor and friend) and Aubrey Seader (a fabulous actress and Sounds of South alumna).  It was amazing!  The interactions were believable, intense, and powerful.  The actors embraced the roles such that you were immersed in the situation and rooting for the characters.  On Friday night we saw Cardinal’s performance of Baskerville.  What a fun production!  The staging was phenomenal.  They brought the Hound to life, even if it didn’t end well for the sheep in the performance or the spectral hound who attacked the Baskerville clan.  The pacing was fast and the costume changes constant, which made for a very entertaining evening.  I love having two such strong theater companies in our town.  As I started to write this on Saturday, I wasn’t sure there was going to be a pie for the report.  Fortunately, Jim found some gold rush apples at the farmer’s market.  He got up early to make a pie this morning!  It looks great, but I won’t know for sure until dinner tonight.  I’ll provide a report when I can.

Until next week

Martina Celerin

My month of adventure and travel!

The last time I blogged it was the week prior to the Fourth Street Festival of the Arts.  I’m tugged in so many different directions once the fair starts that I can’t focus on much else.  This year’s show turned out to be perfect in so many ways.  The weather responded beautifully to my demands and the weekend was sunny and pleasant.  The crowds responded by packing the streets, looking as happy as I’ve ever seen them flowing by my booth.  The show was the perfect capstone to a wonderful summer of art.  After take down Sunday, my life took a few days to return to something close to normal.  I had to get everything put away and re-enter the family routine.  I was welcomed home with a delightful dinner and raspberry pie so I knew everything was OK. 

About that time, though, I had to begin preparing for a workshop I was planning to do at the Artful Dimensions gallery in Fredericksburg Virginia.  I was so excited to participate instead of coordinate a workshop! Having the amazing Pamela MacGregor teach us about dimensional wet felting was an incredible prospect.  Except for one small problem.  The workshop was scheduled for Friday through Sunday, and my flight touched down on Saturday night.  Our organizational wires got crossed somewhere and it look like I was not going to be able to attend.  The husband of my host Elizabeth Woodford, Tom, came up with a great solution, though.   

He said I should just come to Virginia for an art-cation!  Both Elizabeth and Barbara Posey, my host from my last trip to the gallery, both urged me to come in such welcoming tones that I felt good about traveling.  On the trip east I made lemon slices for a new art piece idea I’m going to try out at the holiday markets—I’m going to create some much smaller compositions at a lower price point.  Somehow the idea of making lemons on the trip was my way to turn the trip into spiritual lemonade.   

The bonus for me was that they worked it out with Pam that I could participate on the final day of the workshop.  I do have some experience with wet felting, which meshed with the call for intermediate to advanced felters at the course.  She guided me through techniques I had read about but hadn’t tried myself.  I ended up with a fabulous tea pot, wet fingers and a lot of great new ideas to try back in Bloomington.  I’m inspired to create more 3D pieces after completing the entire teapot project on the last day.  Pamela is such an amazing teacher and a fountain of knowledge and techniques that traveling to Virginia was definitely the right decision. 

The trip wasn’t all hands-on art exploration, though.  Elizabeth and Tom are regular commuters to Washington DC, which makes them familiar with the best times, routes, lanes and strategies for efficient travel through a gridlock-prone highway system.  Elizabeth concocted a plan for us to visit DC the day after the workshop to visit museums. 

 I did spend a couple of weeks in DC during my Ph.D. training, but I was tethered to the NIH complex doing research and never got a chance to be a tourist.  Elizabeth more than made up for that.  We visited the Textile Museum and saw some historic kimonos and surface design techniques that survived centuries.  I was constantly doing my visual dance where I take off my glasses and stare very closely at the interstitial textile framework before stepping back to get the big picture view.  Unfortunately, most of the rest of the gallery was between exhibits.  Other trip highlights included the Vietnam veterans memorial, the Vietnam nurses memorial, lunch in a fabulous Mediterranean restaurant and walking along the mall.  That afternoon we visited the Hirschhorn museum.  It’s a place I’ve  read about many times in ArtNews, but to actually be there in the space to experience the outdoor sculpture garden and the exhibits was wonderful.  

 I enjoyed the video art there, which is a form that I have tried hard to appreciate and understand without complete satisfaction on my part.  I also got a chance to see some of the gallery’s own collection, including a huge Helen Frankenthaler, several Calder pieces and at least a dozen Willem De Koonings.  It’s wonderful to see images of pieces, but seeing them live—enjoying the colors and the textures and the face-to-face experience—is so much more powerful than viewing reproductions in a book or on a screen.  It was a fabulous cultural and personal experience, but oh my gosh, the traffic!  The number of people and congestion is just overwhelming.

I spent my final two days in Fredericksburg playing in Elizabeth’s sandbox, which was a lot of fun.  We explored techniques and tried a few experiments to see what we could come up with.  Overall it was a wonderful art-cation, but by the time I was flying home my mind was flying back to the reality of Pippin costuming.  When I had my feet in the costuming studio I launched the final push to create the last of the props and costumes for the production.   

As of today I’m official declaring myself finished!  Of course there are still a few costume tweaks in store.  I’m expecting a few broken elastics to appear and a snap to add or repair.  But all in all, with safety pins and duct tape they could go on stage tomorrow.  The best part of coming home, though, was that my family was so glad to see me that I got another peach pie!  The second pie lasted the past week, with the final slice accompanying coffee Friday morning.  My wonderful family was super excited to see me and I was thrilled to be back home again.  Next up is getting ready for family visits for the Pippin performances, and to take on all the art projects I’ve lined up in my home studio.  Now I need to get back to the enjoyable task of being a working fiber artist!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Rain, rain, rain…

Mother Nature delivered a hefty dose of rain to Bloomington this past week.  She seemed to be a little off-target, though, because a substantial amount of it found its way into my art studio.  Fortunately, there was no damage to my art or materials, but recovery meant rearranging stacks of materials and rolling back the rug.  My array of fans and dehumidifiers took over and I’m back to being functional, but the net effect was an interruption in progress in my studio.  Of course I can take inspiration from just about anything, so rain was my muse this week.  I channeled water away from my happiness by creating umbrellas for Pippin.  In our version, the players are part of a vintage circus scene.   

Rather than shielding the performers from rain, our umbrellas help balance tightrope walkers and add drama to characters.  To achieve the costume palette of amethyst, sapphire and emerald, with black and white serving as neutral colors, I created all of the umbrellas from broken or re-purposed umbrella skeletons.  Thanks wind!  My favorite has to be the one that I made out of the crinoline from a fancy doll dress.  I cut half moons out of the canopy to scallop the edges and added a cane that I picked up at the Recycle Center from the Materialsfor the Arts program.  I replaced the rib tips with disco ball beads from a necklace that Nancy and I found at the Hoosier to Hoosier sale. 

I embellished each of the panels with trim scraps, reclaimed rhinestones, and circles of cut out of old sweatshirts. 

I created two additional umbrellas in a similar spirit of recycling.  This time I used actual umbrellas from which I removed the canopy and replaced it with triangles of fabric scraps.  Of course I embellished the panels!   

Sparkle, pompoms, felt balls and ribbon seemed right.  If that weren’t enough, I made an umbrella for Berthe.  She’s the flamboyant grandmother whose red dresses are shrouded in black that I created a couple of months ago.  The base costumes came from red dresses from My Sister’s Closet.  They were damaged and couldn’t be sold, so they generously donated them to our project.  I overlaid the dress with black lace fabric and clothing from the Recycle Center.  Berthe’s umbrella is unlike those of the circus performers and has a very different color story.   

I replaced the original fabric from an umbrella canopy with black lace triangles.  I covered the ribs on the outside with faceted trim that I got at a surplus store in Tucson, Arizona last year.  I added black felt balls I made several years ago and embellished the umbrella with lace velvet ribbon and red trim the Sounds of South students harvested from various pieces of clothing and curtains.  By the time I was done, the skies had cleared and the rain was gone!

This week I had the opportunity to sit and watch rehearsals for Pippin.  Even though some of the details are still being fleshed out, I can see the that the singing and choreography will be amazing.  I was able to visualize the scenes costumed and with all the props in place, which was an amazing feeling.  I can hardly wait the couple of weeks before costume rehearsals begin!  I can see that there will have to be many quick costume changes, so I’ve built technology into the costumes to allow them to snap on and off.  With seventy kids, who sometimes need to change their complete outfits in a short time, chaos doesn’t begin to describe the first iteration of rehearsals in costumes. 

In other big news of the week, the Pippin T-shirts with my logo I designed have arrived.  Between projects I managed to carve out a few minutes to sit and read the Herald Times in my big comfy chair, but clearly the paparazzi was watching.  I kept waiting for a pie to appear, expectantly sniffing the air when I woke each morning for the wafting aroma of baking pie, only to be disappointed.  My best hope is the peck of peaches that sits in a mound on the kitchen island.  Let it be today!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Much accomplished, little finished…

I thought this week I would begin by talking about costumes I’ve created for the Sounds of South production of Pippin.  That project has taken over most of my week.  One of the big tasks I moved forward, with the help of Nancy Riggert of course, is making Charlemagne’s costume.  In the spirit of full disclosure, Nancy’s son Will and my son Tommie portray the king, so Nancy refers to us as the queen mums.  We worked on the king’s regal cloak, which I wanted to make as rich and ostentatious as possible to reflect his character.  I found a blood red velvet curtain at the recycle center (Materials for the Arts program) months ago, and this became the starting point for the costume I envisioned.  If you’re a person of my generation, there’s a hint of Carol Burnett in the costume, without the curtain rod.  I also found bits and pieces of costume embellishments at the Recycle Center, including a formal red table runner and trim from fancy pillows.  

I added used black fake fur from the hoods of jackets we collected at the Hoosier to Hoosier sale last year, as well as the last bits of a black vest I used to make the headdress for the beast in Beauty and the Beast.  I even found a use for some rings from an old purse, a gold hair barrette, black trim that we harvested from a different red curtain and gold fringe that we got from the Bloomington Thrift Shop.  If that wasn’t regal enough, we added lots of harvested gems to give it sparkle as well.  I love how it looks on the hanger, but I think it looks even better on the actors!  Now I need to create a crown worthy of the cloak.

A second project that we’re tackling is completing an arsenal of swords for the chorus army.  I created a sword design to complement the armor and helmets of the warriors.  The real challenge is repeating the process for seventy swords!  Bret Rothstein cut over 140 hilt halves from rug padding that wasn’t used for the armor.  Charlotte Appel cut out my swirl pattern from craft foam and Bill Riggert cut the lengths of PVC pipe from scraps we found in the theater woodshop, the Re-store and Alice Lindeman’s backyard.  We also cut out blades from leftover corrugated plastic recycled from last year’s Beauty and the Beast costumes.   

Misti Hayes glued the handles all together, including attaching plastic ornaments I collected from the Recycle Center on the handles.  Nancy Riggert is attaching all of the silver fabric to the blades.  Finally, we’ll need to paint the handles silver and attach them to the blades, then -- ta da!  Seventy battle-ready swords for the stage. 

I also spent some time at South working on the sculptural piece needed for the performance, a duck puppet.  For the body of the duck I used a deflated, oversized volleyball that I got from Brian Shepherd at Binford Elementary.  I cut a hole for the actor’s arm to fit in and filled the inside with remnant quilt batting that great Aunt Lois gives me.   

The arm entry passageway is crafted from a stocking of Meredith Burnham that she no longer wanted.  The head I carved from a cylindrical piece of foam from the Recycle Center and the whole thing is covered with felt remnants, also from the Recycle Center.  I began attaching the final layer of feathers, which are leftovers from Babette’s feather duster costume of last year.  It’s so fun to know the history of each little piece of my creations—nothing is cookie cutter when I get rolling. 

On the weaving front I did manage to release the water and sky background from the loom for the willow commission piece and stretch it out into its frame.  It is a small step, but the process is moving forward.  Next I will use my dimensional crocheting technique to build the water forward and create the land mass from which the willow will emerge. 

On the family front, the first week of school is behind us!  It was a long week, even though it had only three days.  As school moves into full swing, the boys will keep training in Taekwondo and weapons as they move toward their second degree black belt.  They will add twice weekly evening rehearsals for Pippin from now through the end of October.  

 It’s going to be a busy fall!  On this Sunday morning, though, after a restful Saturday, they were catching up on their electronic gaming.  This afternoon when the homework clock struck one, all games ended.   

Hmm, and did I mention there is no pie?  We had visitors from Ann Arbor Friday and Saturday night, who generously took us out for a leisurely brunch.  Unfortunately, we missed our Farmer’s Market trip, so at this point there are no peaches for pies or watermelons and cucumbers for the week!  Hopefully the Tuesday market will come through for us.   

Until next week,

Martina Celerin