My Corner of the Sky…

What a week!  It has been a whirlwind of activity around our house.  Everyone in the family stepped up to make the house presentable for Grandma and Tim, Jim’s brother.  I must say it is awfully nice to have the entire house clean at one time, rather than attacking the neediest room each week.  The main focus of their visit was to see Pippin, but I’ll save those stories for later.

After the house started to shine, I did manage to squeeze in more needle felting.  I’m very excited about the felted tiles I’m creating featuring vegetables and fruit.  Everyone knows that fruits and vegetables are healthy to eat, but mine are especially high in fiber.  Ha ha ha!  This week I focused on peas.  When I was sitting outside the room where the boys were having their voice lesson I was positioned underneath a large commissioned piece that featured pea vines on a trellis, which made for a wonderful creative connection.  I worked, listened to singing and looked up at my artistic history.  When I thought about the fancy wine we planned to drink with Tim, I got to thinking about grapes so I had to make a few of those to feature on tiles.  And of course you can never have enough tomatoes, so I made more thick slices that show off the delicate seeds and internal structure. 

Saturday night featured the opening performance of Pippin!  It was fabulous to share the event with my family around me in the center of the sixth row—best seats in the house!  I just got to take it all in.  The kids were amazing!  They sang and performed their hearts out and the audience loved it.  The costumes really pulled it all together—I must say I’m really proud of my designs, and I’m incredibly grateful to all the people who transformed them into costumes, especially Nancy Riggert.  It was fun to see some of the parents who contributed to the costuming after the show, and they got to see how their efforts fit into the big picture.  They were in awe of the entire performance.  I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish as a group.  I’m grateful to Gwen Witten and Chris Miller for giving me this opportunity.  It’s just the biggest canvas I’ve ever worked on, and it’s so much fun to see it all come together. 

Next, a little parental gloating is in order.  Tommie and Jacob were fabulous!  The transformation that Tommie undergoes when he is onstage is phenomenal, to the point that people don’t recognize him.  He does appear different visually underneath grey hair and behind a beard, but his body movements, gesturing and voice characteristics are completely fabricated and distinct from his day-to-day persona.   And, if you want to see them live - the next performance is this Saturday Oct 22, 7pm - and here is the link to the tickets!

I wish my grandfather, a bass in the Czech opera, could have seen him in action.  Jacob shone too—he was a glowing, performing ball of energy.  He embraces the stage, but his stage persona is a caricature of how we see him at home.  He was a confident magician, a dynamic circus performer, and always in command of his art.  My little pumpkins!

We had a wonderful visit with Grandma and Tim.  We shared lots of stories and laughs over meals and a trip to the Farmer’s market on Saturday morning.  We found hot chocolate and coffee for everyone—including me!  Marina made me a special, off the menu, decaffeinated coffee that made me very happy.  At the market we sampled a variety of dainties for breakfast and found enough vegetables for the week. The biggest news from the gastronomic adventures was that there was pie.  It was an amazing blueberry/strawberry creation using fruit from our trip to Andrews Produce on Topsail Island back in May.  It came after the almond encrusted walleyes the crew caught in July and a nice bottle of wine, so we had an excellent meal.  And I got pie for breakfast over the next few days!  Today I finished the last slice, though.  I’m beginning the next countdown to the next pie—I wonder what and when it will be?

Until next week

Martina Celerin

The last enchanted rose petal fell…

I am settling back into my writer’s chair, having just rediscovered my art studio and finding just enough time to write about my life again.  I delighted in an extraordinarily packed summer wherein I traveled to art fairs, fulfilled commissions, and created the costumes for Sounds of South’s Beauty and theBeast.  I had a wonderfully successful art fair season, including winning a ‘Best in Show’ award in Madison, Wisconsin’s Art Fair on the Square.  It’s a huge honor, and it includes an automatic invitation to participate in the 2016 event.  I’m already looking forward to traveling back to Madison!  The real elephant in the room, though, which kept me away from blogging, was my role in creating costumes for Beauty and the Beast.  The whole project came together wonderfully as the summer wound down.  The culmination of the process was opening night, October 17^th, when I got to sit in the audience with my hubby and watch the spectacle unfold.  The extraordinarily talented kids, including my son Tommie, really brought the costumes to life and the performance was simply amazing.  I couldn’t help but cry as the story unfolded.  All through the show’s run and beyond the response of the audience has been beyond words.  The entire process, from conceptual design of the costumes to putting the costumes into storage has been incredibly gratifying and unforgettable. 

The end of the run of Beauty and the Beast coincided with the beginning of my fall holiday show season.  That meant that there was little time to regroup before showing my art at the Convention Center.  Now I’m done with shows for the season and I can focus my December on my family and new art creation.  I can re-enter my own little nest, surrounded by boxes and boxes of yarns and collected materials.  I see myself as ‘not too busy’, but my loving spouse might disagree.  I currently have two exhibits hanging and I’m delivering pieces for the third on Monday.  The Bloomington Bagel Company in the Shoppes has ‘Changing Seasons’ and the Convention Center has the group exhibit ‘A Celebration of the Arts’.  The new exhibit will be the Member’s Exhibit of the SDA, the Surface Design Association, at the Blue Line Gallery.  Finally, in mid-December I’ll be sharing my adventures into a different medium by hanging a series of my colored pencil sketches at the Bagel Company on Dunn Street.  The series is called ‘My Summer Vacation’ and features drawings from a trip to Topsail Island in North Carolina this past May.  There will be opening receptions on December 4th for two of the exhibits, so it’s party time!  I’ll give more information in the next blog if you’re interested in attending. 

My major project for November and December is to catch up on all of my business accounting and apply for the next round of summer art fairs.  It’s not very glamorous work, but it’s a necessary task if I want to travel next summer.  I’ll also keep busy doing art during my waiting times when the boys are doing Taekwondo, Brazilian Jiu jitsu, Hip Hop and voice lessons.  I have to keep my hands occupied, so I’ve been needle felting small fruit slices for a new composition.  This past summer I created a piece, ‘Fruit Platter’, that I completed the day before we left for Madison Wisconsin.  We set up the booth and hung the piece, and the very first piece that sold was Fruit Platter.  I feel like I never got to enjoy it, and I never got a quality image of the piece.  I’ve been working on Fruit Platter II, which is now finished and I love this one too!  It is appearing in the Convention Center exhibit and in my application portfolio for summer art fairs. 

The arrival of cooler weather means its time to hunker down and cook chili, soup and lasagna for the freezer.  Everything I do, though, takes me back to art.  I began to recall years passed when we made ‘Fall Stew’ every year by collecting roots from the farmer’s market and cooking them into family dinners.  It sounds very romantic and fulfilling, and it was for a few years.  We made so much of it that it became a bit of a family joke that no one looked forward to.  I missed the nostalgia of it, so to celebrate the memory I’m creating a weaving called ‘Fall Stew’.  It will feature sliced tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, carrots, onions and other roots.  The vegetables will undoubtedly be my handwork project to pass the time during boy activities over the next month or so. 

For those of you who might be concerned that I didn’t get enough pies over the summer break in the blog, rest assured.  I paused during cherry pie season, about the time that Jim put a special pie filling in the freezer for our Mississippi relatives when they came for the Beauty and the Beast performance.  Since then we’ve had tart and sweet cherry, blueberry, peach, rhubarb, rhubarb blueberry, and persimmon pies.  The persimmon version was just a little too intense gastrically, so we won’t be making it again.  My last pie, sadly, was October 24^th when we pulled the tart cherry pie filling from the freezer for our guests.  Martha had never had a real cherry pie—I’m sorry, the canned stuff just doesn’t count.  The pie was awesome, but now it’s time for more!  I’m just going to have to suffer through pumpkin pies at Thanksgiving until I can get back on track with the freezer full of fruit pie filling, just waiting to have their pie dreams fulfilled!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Green Grapes and Soup

What a pleasant Saturday this is! Normally I’d be showing at Art Fair on the Square today (here in Bloomington), but this year I decided to take the day off. I’ll replace the show with an adventure to Madison for their version of Art Fair on the Square, which is downtown in the Capitol of Wisconsin in early July. So instead of getting up early and getting set up I got to sleep in a little and begin my relaxed Saturday at the farmer’s market. We traditionally have part of our breakfast there. That usually means scones, muffins, cookies or croissants. It also means cheese curds, the freshest cucumbers of the season and whatever else we happen to find that fits the taste of the family. This week it was blueberries for a pie (yum!), peaches, and some flowers that needed a home. From the market we strolled over to the Square to inspect the art and engage in a little friendly artist-chat. The rest of the family played games on the cannon and the big grate on the northwest corner of the Square. The highlight, though, was finding Eleanor Broaded. She’s a jeweler based in Indianapolis and I love her work. For some reason, though, her elegant earrings somehow get caught in my clothes and fall off without me noticing. This year I got a nice brown ceramic pair of earrings that I really like. That made the whole walk worthwhile.

In the art world, I’m beginning a new project. I’m starting a still life intended to go above a mantelpiece over a fire. To begin I made a series of sketches, and the one that started to take shape in my mind is shown. I fleshed out the thumbnail layout to come up with a working composition that includes three candles, apples, grapes, cherries and lots of juicy colors. I began by creating the grapes, and of course that means a trip to Bloomingfoods to get the green, organic grapes for a model. The setback in this part of this story is that the grapes sat in the car next to the eSoA (elder son of artist) on the way home. He scarfed them down, leaving me with a good model for the stems but no grapes. So I scampered off to O’Malias, got more grapes that stayed in the front seat, and quickly got them down to my art studio. I pulled out three different green fleece to create the grape green, two of which I dyed myself last year. I carded them together and needle felted them into grape shapes. The process is very time consuming but I think they’re cute. Next I’ll create the stem parts (I’m all set on models there).

My other activity over the past two days has been converting our CSA (community supported agriculture) harvest into something compatible with freezer storage and quick dinners. On Friday I made a big batch of a soup I really like –Hungarian cabbage and dumpling soup. The HoA (husband of artist) really likes this soup too, but he doesn’t know about the secret ingredient that he would never eat (sauerkraut). Today I also made ‘Lois Soup’, named after a friend of the family (Lois Graham) who introduced it to us as a non-vegetarian friendly recipe. I made a few changes here and there, and voila! A hearty kale-based vegetarian soup. It had fresh garlic and onions from the farmer’s market, a little bay and rosemary from my kitchen plants, and a few secret ingredients I’d never put into writing. A cook has to have a few secrets!

One last bit of news—I have a new bike. At least it’s a new-to-me bike. I used to have a 1960s era English-made bike that was a hand-me-down from Grandpa. He demanded a big, comfy seat in his bikes, and that was its best feature. But after a 10-mile bike ride with the eSoA last week it was clear I needed something more than the clunky old one-speed I had. So I hopped over to the Bicycle Garage and found a used bike that needed a good home. It was hard to give up my big cushy seat, but the fellow there assured me that the seat would be equally comfy. Hmmm…we’ll just see!

Until next week…