Fourth street in the rear view mirror

Wow, what an incredibly intense week!  The annual Fourth Street Art Festival was scheduled for last week, but the remnants of Hurricane Isaac threatened the show.  The early weather predictions not only put us in its path, they predicted from 5 to 10 inches of rain for the weekend.  They even called the chance of rain both days around 100%.  As I watched the radar, though, it wasn’t as clear that it was going to hit us.  The system was moving more slowly and more to the west than the predicted path.  Whether or not we should even hold the show became a tough call, with the thoughts of possibly moving it indoors.  If we were clearly going to get hit it would have been an easy call.  The phone was ringing off the hook with calls from people who wanted to know our plans, including area newspapers.  

 My stress level went through the roof!  To make a long story short, we made our best judgment on the storm’s path and decided to hold the show outdoors in its usual place.  The Friday evening set-up went just fine, although you could tell that the weather was unstable with a threat in the air.  The streets were marked in record time as we all raced to get the booths set up and filled with art while it was dry.  When Saturday dawned the rain was still a state away to the east and moving North, not west toward us.  Hooray!  We had an absolutely beautiful Saturday, with just a couple of light sprinkles.  There were even patches of sun!  I couldn’t have asked for a better day.  People came out and bought art and everyone was in a great mood.  The forecast for Sunday was still pretty ominous.  I was still on high alert, but the day turned out to feature light rain, but no real threats.  No tornadoes, no lightning and no flooding came our way.   

In fact, the rain stopped about two hours before the end of the show!  That gave everyone a dry pack-up, which in "artspeak" meant the show was perfect.  I was positively giddy when I got home and had a nice dinner with wine.  Fortunately, Jim kept me from posting all the thoughts that ran through my head on Facebook.  In hindsight, that was probably a good thing.  Oh, and a little known secret—when I got home Saturday night, after handing out all the official awards to participating artists at the ‘official’ dinner, I came home to find that I had won the ‘Best in Show’ award!  There was a freshly-baked raspberry pie with a little ribbon on it for me.  The berries came from the Farmer’s market and the kitchen still smelled like baked pie.  I’m so glad my family thinks I always win the best in show!

Over the past week I’ve been catching up on all the projects I put on hold.  I first had to recover some sense of serenity after dealing with the show.  On top of that, a bad cold had settled into my family (but luckily, not me).  Nobody has slept very well over the past several days.  

 In the art world, I got more serious about my large landscape commission piece targeted for completion by month’s end.  That meant dyeing a bunch of yarn to get the colors I needed.  Fortunately, I just love dyeing yarn! 

 It’s very rewarding, just like picking fungal spores.  At the end of the day you have a whole pile of stuff to show for your work, and you get to build on all your hard work later on.  The spores yield Petri plates with germinated fungal mycelia to do more experiments, while the yarn goes into all sorts of projects, not all of which have even been imagined yet.  Now my yarns are drying on the veranda.  The humidity finally dropped on Saturday so I’m in pretty good 

shape.  I pulled out my enormous loom and I’m about to clamp it onto an easel to warp it.  I can’t tell you how glorious it sounds to have a day when all I have to do is weave, something else I love to do!  And you’re not going to believe this, but after another trip to the Farmer’s market, Jim baked me another raspberry pie!  It was so popular the first time that I didn’t get to enjoy much of it with coffee for breakfast.  And now I have another one!  Oh. My. Gosh.  Can life get any better?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Newsflash: Moss grows on wheelbarrow!

OK, so maybe it's not actually moss...This week I decided it was time to start working on some of my commissions. One features a three-dimensional path through the woods on a large-scale format. The tree branches will need leaf clumps to project out of the piece, so a couple of weeks ago I started crocheting some yarns together to see if I could produce the effect I wanted. The initial result was disappointing, which convinced me I needed to dye some mohair boucle a deeper shade of green for the leaves. Around a month ago I ordered some big loop mohair boucle from Sheep Street in Morgantown for the project. A few weeks ago I picked it up, but I’ve been waiting for a block of time in my schedule to pull out my dye pots and experiment with it. Fortunately, I have several big stainless steel dye pots in storage. My father-in-law envisioned them for traditional salmon boil dinners, but they never got much use. They’re perfect for me—thanks Grandpa! The day’s success was some gorgeous greens that will be perfect for the commission piece. I was also feeling very experimental, so I decided to try dyeing with some fur scraps and old fur clothing I got from Marilyn Brackney a couple of weeks ago to share with Cappi Phillips. I took what I thought was a reasonable amount, throwing in the white and light brown fur pieces into the dye pot to fulfill my grand vision of fluffy green fur pieces to use in the ground cover adjacent to the trail. Unfortunately, I learned that when you boil animal skin it turns into a globby mess. Only a few small pieces survived the process. My inner scientist reminded me that every experiment is useful, even the failures. She thinks that will help rationalize having to clean up the mess, but she’s wrong. I just focus on the intense green boucles and some other wool that I threw in as a ‘what the heck’ kind of test. I always find a use for everything.

My other major art project involved an intense effort on completing the grassy blades for my ‘Sunrise over Goose Pond’ piece. I attached them to the background and I’m close to calling the piece done – I think that a wandering, half awake salamander looking for his “morning joe,” unaware of the distant hooded crane, will be the finishing touch.

The mail carrier has been my friend this week. When I think of our mail carriers, I fondly remember a family story involving a very young Jacob. We were sitting at the dinner table having an animated conversation about something. We asked him, with enthusiasm, “What do birds eat?” He shouted out “mail carriers!” Of course we all broke up laughing. Anyway, the mail carriers escaped the birds of prey to bring me a letter from Homeland Security inviting me to take my citizenship oath in about two weeks. As soon as I finished my citizenship test (did I mention I got a perfect score?!) I decided on a vision for a weaving I wanted to make. The piece will be called ‘A Home of my Own’. It’s really about my journey toward citizenship in this country with my wonderful extended family and the loving community I live in. It will feature a hand holding a trowel, digging a hole in a patch of garden soil. Adjacent to the hole will be a small seedling, ready to be transplanted.

The snail mail carriers weren’t the only ones on my side this week. My e-mail brought me the news that the Loring Park Art Fair in Minneapolis had chosen me to be a featured artist this year! I had to scramble to put together some text describing my work and my history, but that’s all in place. I’m really honored to be selected, and I’m looking forward to the trip out there this August.

The big local event on my horizon is the Trashion-Refashion show this Sunday at the Buskirk-Chumley theater. It is presented by the Center for Sustainable Living and Discardia, and it starts at 7 p.m. It’s all very hush-hush, but I’ll let you in on a secret—I’ve created a trophy for the show. I’ve been sworn to secrecy about the design, but next week I’ll post a picture. I also created some fashion for the show, which I will model this year. My son Jacob has an outfit that he designed and will model, and Tommie has volunteered to hand out programs at the event. Jim will chauffeur and applaud, and so it will be a family event. We had our first rehearsals this week and I know it’s going to be a lot of fun. I hope to see you there!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Dyeing and drying green…

It has been a very green week. Most people do spring cleaning when the weather gets nice—I do my annual green dyeing fest. It usually gives me enough green yarn to carry me through a year of verdant art. I pulled out my dye pots from Grandpa (thanks!) and filled them with greens I like. After the dyeing I drained the green yarns and spread them over a chair in the veranda. It looks very soft and inviting to sit in. When the weather turned cooler I moved everything downstairs to hang and dry more completely.

Speaking of turning things green, I spent a little quality time with my brain. If you aren’t up to speed on this project, I’m embellishing one of the 22 brains in Bloomington’s ‘Brain Extravaganza!’ It’s the brainchild of Jill Bolte-Taylor, pun intended. I met my brain at Stonebelt this week among a bunch of other brains. Mine is gong to represent my interpretation of bipolarism. The right hemisphere is now a lawn of green felt to be covered in flowers I created, and the theme is a floral euphoria. I spent a big block of time, at least when I wasn’t chatting with my friend Bonnie Gordon-Lucas working nearby, attaching felt to the right hemisphere of the brain. I’ve been collecting felt scraps for years, knowing I’d have a use for them someday, and now I do! I used up every last green scrap I had. I tested several glues along the way to see what works best to adhere the coarse resin brain surface to felt and discovered that good old white glue was the best. The good news, and bad news, is that I went through my entire collection of leftover white glue bottles. I started the project with two two-gallon bags full of partially used bottles of white glue; now I’m completely out. My husband thinks I’m going to stand outside the elementary school after classes and mug kids to get more. Have I said I’m big on reclaiming and recycling? The problem is that I don’t have enough glue to finish the dark side of my brain, so I see a trip to Pygmalion’s soon to pick up another gallon or so. If you can’t use recycled materials, buy them locally I say.

My own brain got to re-thinking my ‘Hilly Hundred’ piece this week. I decided that the green background I made isn’t persuasive enough to evoke the hilliness I want for the twelve bike wheels I just created. I need to play with some design ideas to make it more dimensional. I decided that the background I made would be perfect for a project I mentally composed about a year and a half ago. Of course I got sidetracked before completion, but now I’m back on the job. The vision is to have a hand holding a bouquet of dandelions above a diverse background of more traditional garden flowers. It speaks to the idea that things don’t need to be commercial or prized by society to have great value to a person. People think of dandelions as mundane weeds, but they provide the first real explosion of colors for the world in spring, whether you planted them or not. When my boys were little they would pick dandelions for me, which they saw as pretty. They just wanted to share flowers with me because they knew they made me happy. I still cherish the little yellow splashes of spring.

Art making never seems to completely fill my week. Thursday evening was the big grand re-opening of the Bloomington Playwright’s Project. Chad and Gabe and a whole bunch of volunteers have done an amazing job converting the theater from a dingy gray space into a warm inviting living room. It’s an accessible and inviting place to be. Part of the ceremony was the official unveiling of two art pieces that were intended to capture the spirit of the BPP and to be part of a permanent collection. Oliver Winery underwrote the commissions for two pieces (thanks Oliver!). Joel Washington, a terrific Bloomington artist, did one and the other was one of mine. I was delighted and honored to be included in the project and the re-opening ceremony. I’m very grateful to Chad for re-establishing the BPP as a Bloomington landmark and artistic treasure. His vision and energy were just what the place needed and demands.

And if that wasn’t enough for one week, on Friday night we were all off to Wonderlab for the aluminum pouring event. About a month ago my boys and I picked up sand molds and long nails for carving designs. The boys set to work almost immediately, scratching designs into the artificial sandstone medium. I put off my design until the day before the pour because I couldn’t decide on a subject. During my dyeing spree I went out into the veranda and the sun was shining, so I knew what I had to do! We watched them pour molten aluminum into the molds and buff the cooled products. While we waited, we had a nice macaroni and cheese dinner upstairs, care of Bloomingfoods, and did a little running around inside. The pieces turned out beautifully, and everyone involved was excited to participate in the process of creating the aluminum casts. It was a week of delightful experiences all around.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin