Beach week!

I didn’t get a lot of art done this week, but I got a lot of art thinking done. That translates into developing ideas for pieces and planning how to execute them. The location had a lot to do with that—my family spent the week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I feel completely rejuvenated after a week of sand and sun! I took a lot of pictures of the waves, surf and sand to help jog my memory as I get back to work. I also did some material acquisition, collecting shells with holes in them from the beach. That happens to be one of Tommie’s favorite activities. We planned our mornings around low tide when the best collecting occurs. After one night of thunderstorms and wind we found a treasure trove of collected shells, sand dollars and beach glass just under the surface. What a haul I made for a few beach-themed weavings! Unfortunately, we packed so much stuff in our suitcases on the trip out that we didn’t have any weight to spare for packing shells. Fortunately, the post office has big boxes, and ‘if it fits, it ships’. About five days of beach treasures fits, along with a pair of jeans and some leftover rice to fill in the cracks. I’ll look for that to arrive on Tuesday.

Most of the week was spent in rejuvenation mode after a long winter of doing commissions. That meant eating fresh seafood as often as possible. We had fresh flounder, tuna, mahi mahi, and mako shark, plus a small black drum that Tommie caught. The shark was the surprise meal of the trip. Its texture was distinct from most fish and its flavor was mild and delectable. Along the boardwalk to the beach we found wild blackberries ripening nicely in the sandy soil. Tommie took the lead in berry collection and by the end of the week we had enough for Jim to bake a nice pie. Warm from the oven and paired with caramel frozen yogurt it was delightful. It was worth every bite, but I can’t wait to get back to Zumba in the mornings!

My family found lots of activities to keep them busy. The ocean was the major attraction. Jacob was the boogie board champion, riding the breaking surf all the way up onto the beach. He named his board ‘dragon slicer’, and they were together at every possible opportunity. Tommie got a board too, but decided he’d rather body surf. That left the second board to Jim, and he and the boys spent a lot of quality time riding the waves. The only downside was the ocean temperature on most days. It was occasionally so cold on that I couldn’t get much past my ankles, which made me the beach documentarian. On a few days I did swim, and it was wonderful to be in the ocean and feel the power of the surf. Besides the beach, we went to Jockey’s Ridge State Park where we hiked to the top of a few huge sand dunes. Jim and I sat and had pleasant conversation while the boys rolled down the steep dunes. We enjoyed the panoramic view of both the ocean and the sound while the boys ran up and down and finally buried each other in the dunes. The discomfort of having sand in your hair was removed by a stop at Logan’s ice cream in Nags Head.

The return to Bloomington means the return to art. The upcoming weekend (June 3-5) I’ll be in Columbus Ohio for the Columbus Arts Festival. I’m scrambling to finish a new piece before I go. This year I’d like to avoid the severe thunderstorms that trapped me in my booth for a while. I hope to see you there!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Beach Week 2010

What an awesome adventure! I just got back from a week with my family in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The highlights were fresh fish, good wine, exploring the area and splashing around in the surf. I even got some work done in quiet moments, although that qualifies as fun for me. With such a full week it’s hard to know where to begin!

I guess I’ll start with the art and fill in the rest. I made the conscious decision not to take my needle felting along. That spared me the suspicious looks I get at security checkpoints at the airport. I took pencil crayons and charcoal pencils, and I picked up rice paper at a local art supply shop. The felt tiles I’ve been working on were calling to me, so I took the chance to do some small studies in composition and color to decide which elements I want to commit to art pieces.
I practiced positioning colors in different sectors of the pieces to try to draw my eye in different ways. I was very much influenced by the nature scenes around me, so you’ll see a lot of sandy, grassy or wavy motifs. There are also a lot of seashell shapes, and even a wine bottle or two. Hmm, I wonder how that got in there? I’ll sift through what I have for use as templates for future tiles.

The weather this year was a little cooler and cloudier than past trips we’ve made. That sent us off to new adventures, such as a drive to Jockey’s Ridge State Park. This is the largest sand dune on the outer banks and a great place to climb. Actually, it’s a great place to climb up once, and an even better place for the kids to roll or run down the dunes. Everyone sleeps better at night when that happens! We also did a couple of trips to mini-golf courses. This year I came out with the lowest scores on both trips! The bad news is that the winner has to buy ice cream for the family, so I’m on notice until I pay off one more debt. Later in the week we had a couple of sunny, warm days where we drove to the beach by the Currituck lighthouse. There’s a great beach beyond the dunes for kid-friendly swimming. The boys spent most of their time body surfing or riding a boogie board we found at our rental house, while I guarded the blanket and kept the ghost crabs at bay. They’re fun to watch emerge when things quiet down around you to clear the sand out of their hole. That’s a heroic task on a windy, sandy beach, but they seem up to it. I managed to do some shell collecting too. Mostly I collected small, polished fragments that might well become fish skeletons. And to cap off each long day of exploring, a trip to the hot tub on the back deck was a great way to unwind.

When vacationing on the outer banks, eating fresh seafood is part of the equation for us. This year we discovered Carawan’s seafood market and got fresh tuna, redfish and flounder. Each ended up as a delightful meal, culminating with a pan-seared tuna with toasty garlic, onion and lime in the mix. We ate it with fresh bread and a nice Ganache, based on the advice of our new best friend Chip at Chip’s Wine and Beer Market in Kill Devil Hills. Chip taught us about matching different kinds of food with wine based on which part of the palate you taste the wine, and he taught us to value growing climate over grape varietal when making a selection. We learned a lot and had a lot of fun chatting with Chip. He has a tremendous selection and his shop is a must-stop site for wine drinkers on the outer banks.

Well, all good things must come to an end, and our week on the sand and in the surf is no exception. On our drive back to Norfolk we did stop in at the Botanical Gardens next to the airport. It’s well worth the trip, with hundreds of rose varieties in bloom, a native garden, flowering trees, a kids garden, a butterfly enclosure, a coniferous garden, a half-hour tram ride—it’s just a great place to spend the day. But now that I’m back I have to shift my artist persona into high gear. I’ll be hanging a show Wednesday in the Phi Gallery at the Hotel Indigo in Columbus, Indiana (the reception is June 10 from 5:30-7:00 pm.). Then later this week I head for Ohio to participate in the Columbus Arts Festival this weekend. It’s my first time in the show so I’m excited to see how it plays out. If you’re in the area, stop by and say hello!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Thoughts of warmer weather…

We’re back in the icebox in southern Indiana after a nice warm-up last week. While my frozen toes understand reality, my mind is off in warmer places. I finished my seashell piece, but with a twist that took even me by surprise. I had very carefully laid out a pattern for the large shells, designed to create clear movement as you visually took in the piece. Then my inner child quickly surveyed the piece and clearly demanded: MORE SHELLS! I watched as she grabbed a handful from my ‘shells with holes’ bag and proceeded to dump them on the piece. I gave her a healthy snack to settle her down a little, and while she was eating I arranged the shells a little. I loved the idea of having a little chaos in the front, and yet if you look carefully you can still see the underlying pattern and flow. Now there’s a metaphor for my life with kids! Or maybe the feel of the piece just captures that little depression in the beach you find where all the shells collect at low tide. There’s usually a cute little beat-up seastar that didn’t handle the surf well. That’s the metaphor for my husband.

A lot of other new or commissioned art is also coming together in my studio, and some of it will unexpectedly be on display around town this month. I got word from Jean Kautt at Bloomingfoods (she organizes the Blooming Arts Series) that the February artist had a family emergency and couldn’t hang a show. I have a few new birch pieces (birches, beaches—I’ve got to branch out), plus a few ‘previously shown’ pieces that I’ll hang at both Bloomingfoods locations. The show will be called “Thoughts of Warmer Weather: Water and Sunshine”. The east side store will feature ‘Water’ and the west side will be ‘Sunshine’ in case you’re wondering. I won’t show my new ‘Home Grown Tomatoes’ commission piece, but after adding the last little cluster of tomatoes it looks warm, happy and yummy. This weekend I’ll complete the attaching and call it done. I’ll also be at Wonderlab this Friday as part of their “The Science of Color Series”, doing a kid- and adult-friendly community art project. We’re going to build a large Eastern Tiger Swallowtail mosaic out of wine corks that volunteers have been painting for the project. Stop on by and share in the fun!

Finishing pieces also means new beginnings, and at the moment I’m struggling to decide which piece to launch into next. I have several ideas swirling around in my head, and basically I’ll just wait to see what the weather is like Monday to decide which color palate I need to work with. The first piece will present a chameleon, sitting on a fernlike compound leaf. The second will feature a sand crab on a beach pocked with crab holes. Keeping the sand out of their living room carpets must be quite a task—I’m sure there’s a great market for rugged sand crab vacuum cleaners. The third piece hits a little closer to home, to be called something like ‘The Transplant’. It will show a section of earth with a freshly dug hole, ready to receive a geranium with a severely overgrown root ball. If you’ve ever bought a flower that’s spent a little too much time at the greenhouse with abundant light and fertilizer you know what I mean. It’s going to be a little painful (for everyone involved) to break up the root ball and get started in a new environment, but you know it’s both necessary and the right thing to do. I think about my own transplantations that way, whether it was my move from Ontario to Bloomington, or whether it was my move from world of science into the art community. I owe a lot to the gardeners along the way, and I know that with a little light, water and fertile ground, anyone can blossom!

Until next week…

Hello, it’s the beach calling…

I’m officially jealous this week. I have a few friends who spent part of the holidays much farther south, while I’ve been in Bloomington freezing my toes through a cold snap that finally broke this week. When I hear their wonderful stories about the beach and warmer weather I’m taken back to an earlier life when I spent the school holidays around Christmas in the Bahamas. I got a lot of prime toes-in-the-sand time, a few sunburns, and all the sights and sounds of a different culture. So in a melancholy moment I decided to pull out my box of ‘sand’ yarns and my collection of seashells. I have a ton of shells that I’ve either collected, or that others have collected on their trips and donated to me. It’s fascinating to me how, over and over, I can collect the most amazing shells on a beach trip. Each one seizes your imagination as you hold them, dripping seawater on the beach. They seem like an integral part of how you’re going to remember that moment in time. But, months later, when you view the collection of shells in your living room the moments are lost. You even wonder why you brought so many shells home. Then a little tinkling of sand comes out of the box and you wish you were back at the beach.

Anyway, I started work this week on my latest beach piece. I pulled out my shell collection and realized that I’m a sorter at heart. I like my collections organized, not only to view and admire, but to make some biological sense out of the phyla I collected. I started by laying out the larger shells in a pattern I liked that I thought created some visual movement to the piece. Then I reached for my two big boxes of ‘sand’ colored yarns. Yep, I’ve got a lot of boxes of yarns! Best of all, they’re all packaged in big plastic boxes to keep them dry when the tide comes in. In Bloomington Indiana that translates into when the power goes out during a rainstorm and the sump pumps fail to keep the water out. When I started to weave I incorporated the big ocean pieces into the warp and wove the yarns around them, kind of like the sand filling in around the shells when the tide comes back in. I also decided that every good beach piece needs some real sand, so I decided to make a sand frame. I have a little experience at this when I made the ‘Gold Fish in a Blue Ocean’ piece in the Creek-Love classroom last year and I was pleased with how it came out. Exactly how I do it is a closely guarded secret, but it involves repeated application of diluted wood glue and beach sand.

In Scarf News, I opened up the Herald Times this morning to see the bright red image of one of my scarves. I’ve got a show up called ‘Warm and Cosy: Scarf Art’ at the Bloomington Bagel Company. It’s one of three exhibits that are up around town right now, (the other two are at the Waldron and Wonderlab) and all three are mentioned in the Sunday paper. Take a brief pause and imagine the haughty look I’m putting on for you right now. I managed to sell three scarves this week, and one of them set off an unexpected chain of events. I got a call from someone at BBC that was waiting to buy a scarf. I hopped in Bluebelle (my trusty car) and sped downtown. Did I say sped? Actually, I was going about the speed limit, and I was even using my turn signals. I don’t recommend doing that any more—it just draws attention to you. Anyway, Mr. Policeman noticed that I didn’t come to a complete stop at the deserted four way stop. He asked if I knew that I wasn’t in full compliance with the law, whereupon I launched into a full-bore defense of the arts (and my participation in supporting them in the local community) and he let me off with a warning. If you’re reading this, thank you! I promise I’ll do better. I made it to the sale on time and all was well.

One last note for the week: no one noticed, not even me, but last week was my one-year blogging anniversary. I wrote my first entry on January 10th, 2009, and last week “Tomatoes in the Snow’ was my 52nd entry. I offer my sincere thanks to everyone who reads and follows my work, whims, travels and family exploits.

Until next week…