Working through the basketball game.

Last week I promised to share the image of my completed lemon commission, but the piece has not yet been delivered to Massachusetts.  I promise that next week I’ll post it – for sure!!  In the meantime, I’ve launched into my next commission, which involves revisiting my very first version of Winter Birches.  I pulled out all my whites and soft greys, greens and purples and began weaving the companion piece.  It feels a lot like retracing one’s own footsteps, because I’m weaving with the reference piece right beside my easel.  

 I look at the original and think…  oooh, that’s how I did that!  I even managed to find some of the original yarns I used in the piece.  I still need to make the trees and the branches, so that’s on my agenda for this week. 

I’ve also been working on the needle felting parts of two garden-themed pieces that I have in progress.  I managed to make two of the three onions for the ‘We Three Kings’ piece that will feature three onions underground.  The white onion is created from a natural-colored white fleece.  The yellow onion is fleece that I dyed with yellow onionskins last year.  The third, purple onion is something I’ll be working on during the IU game this afternoon.  It features hand-dyes purple mohair that I got from Fleece Fair last year.  The surface veins for this onion feature a beautiful purple alpaca – and I have no idea where I got it!  If the game is an easy win for IU, I should be able to get it done during the game.  If it’s intense battle, like the Butler game, I probably get too caught up in watching the game and I’ll have to finish the onion tonight.  

 This week I also completed the three crocus flower heads I intended to put into a weaving.  Now that I’m looking at the finished flowers, I might just choose one of the flower heads for the piece and add two buds that also pop out around the main flower.  To me, that is more reminiscent of the clumps of crocuses that come up in the spring.  I’ll see how I feel about the composition when I lay out the flowers on the piece.  

Mid winter is a busy time of year for art and city meetings.  Tuesday I hosted the Open Studios Tour meeting.  The event will be happening on April 27^th and 28^th this year.   Plenty of planning has to happen before then.  This year our call for artists brought in forty artists, with almost two thirds of them are new to the event.   The organizing committee is an enthusiastic bunch and it’s great fun to work with them.  And at home, tomorrow I’m planning on baking some lemon-poppy seed muffins, as requested by the boys.  It’s a poor substitute for pie, but I’m optimistic that the pleasant smells in the kitchen will remind Jim that he needs to bake another pie!  Peach, please!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Seeing red as Valentine’s Day approaches

I’ve been seeing red all week long. Unfortunately, instead of red wine and red boxes of chocolates, it has all been tomato sauce for my Ratatouille piece. I started off with a huge pile of red yarns on my art studio floor and I’ve watched them simmer into the background of the piece. I need to create about thirty vertical inches by five feet wide. So far I’ve managed eighteen inches and burned out every red light receptor I ever had. I have a sudden urge to run down a matador and gore him. On the bright side, I love to weave, so it’s still been great to be in the art studio all week.

Of course ratatouille requires lots of fresh vegetables. I started creating some giant onion slices out of some little felted rectangles I got from my friend Cappi. We think they’re rejected brake pads for some device. Cappi picked up a huge box of them at the recycle center a few years back and they’ve been searching for just the right project ever since. It came to me that by connecting them I could create onion rings. They project is still at a stage where the untrained eye might not see them as onion rings, but I know it’s going to work out. I stitched them together on a skeleton of remnant baling wire scraps. It’s all I can do to keep from crying.

As I’ve zoomed ahead on my second commission piece, I’ve still been working on completing the first piece. I finished the last of the vegetables – the three onions – and with three art-related evening meetings this week I’ve had plenty of time to needle felt the oversize hand I’ll add that’s pulling out the Alice in Wonderland-sized carrot. I’m delighted with how that’s coming along, although I need to lay it out on the piece to make sure the scale is right. The size is based on sketches done on grid paper so it should be good. Still, it has to look good in place or it isn’t right. Tomorrow is the day I finally take a deep breath and lay out all the elements together on the background.

My social schedule this week was overwhelmed by meetings, but Wednesday at noon I did go to the SOFA gallery with Cappi and Dawn to see the current MFA/BFA exhibits. I even managed to avoid getting a ticket this time! I really love going to these events with my artist friends because they can recognize and articulate elements in the work that I can’t. I love being able to compare it to what I see and feel about each piece. Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the pieces really lets you appreciate your own weaknesses as an artist. We saw one piece that was incredible structured and detailed with orange geometric shapes on a gray background. The crisp shapes were twisted into an extended structure that had a very organic feel. But then the artist put a layer on top that felt like graffiti. I just couldn’t imagine having the strength to invest all the time needed to create the beautiful, detailed work and then cover it with graffiti. Still, it was very powerful. I also got to see some of Sara Nordling’s woven pieces, which I thought were very striking. The most powerful piece had three long horizontal stripes with structures that looked like translucent mushroom gills along the length. The viewer’s eyes just roll back and forth along the gills, bringing a three dimensional aspect to a two dimensional weaving. It was a beautiful, powerful and captivating piece.

That’s probably enough for one week. It will be Valentine’s Day soon, though. What kind of pie is red? Hmmmmm, cherry?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

The art world reclaims me.

By some combination of reasonable weather and administrative fortitude, the school system managed to string together five full days of school this week. For me, that’s like waving a red flag in front of my internal artist. I was able to move along all my major projects this week. First, I finished the background weaving for my large format weaving and tied it off from the loom. I stretched it out on the frame that my personal wood craftsman Tom Bertolacini made for me and stitched it to the oak members. It looks perfect! Then I laid out the completed veggies: three beets, four carrots and one of the onions. The veggies still needed rootlets, so I started wrapping onion rootlets in my waiting times. I have a nice wooden bowl full of them, enough to garnish a big salad. The rootlets that I’ve attached to the onions looked very nice, which meant I could spend a little quality making onion leaves. I picked yarns that formed a gradient from pale to rich green and started wrapping some reclaimed macramé yarn. The finished leaves are more like tubes, the kind of thing a chef chops up for a pretty garnish on an elegant dish. I can finally see the light at the end of the row of vegetables. Of course the real challenge has been to keep the garden rabbits from eating them while I slept at night.

Another project whose deadline is approaching involves putting together a dress for the Trashionista show. I started out with a fabulous idea that involved legs from Barbie dolls. I did a lot of Barbie collecting last year. Then I fed my inner demons by ripping off their little legs! Jim found it all a little creepy, but it was all in the name of high fashion. Given all the icky things models really have to do to succeed I didn’t think I was that bad. As the dress came together, though, I decided that it was just going to be too heavy. I quickly switched to the plan I developed for a second dress. I’ve been collecting dryer sheets, one of my signature recycled fabrics, for a year now. I got out the ironing board to smooth them out and prepare them for painting and glitter application. I’d give you more details, but I know Versace is a troll on my blog. I made the mistake of laying them out on the kitchen island as a surface to add some puffy fabric paint. I added my designs, only to discover that the paint takes three days to dry fully. That’s not consistent with having two boys who need regular feeding and a place to dump all their school stuff. The living room carpet is now covered in handcrafted designer fabric tiles. OK, so they’re really just painted dryer sheets. On the bright side, the people who really appreciate fashion have very broad tolerance for new fabrics. Either that or they can’t tell painted dryer sheets from dyed silk squares. By Monday I should have all the materials for one Trashionista dress, some assembly required. While I have my seamstress hat on I’ll probably mend some of Tommie’s pants with torn out knees. Nothing like two boys to keep your life in perspective.

That covers most of the highlights from the week. I did give my ArtsWork presentation to a small but enthusiastic group of artists in transition on Tuesday. I described my own metamorphosis from scientist to artist, which I really enjoyed. Part of the charm is being able to see how much I’ve grown over the past few years. Each new technique or endeavor, whether it’s needle felting animals, creating wet felted scarves, or print cards of my pieces has been a new part of the adventure. I still feel like I’m a newbie in the art world, though. There’s so much to learn!

That means it’s time to get back to chugging along, making more art, and looking forward to springtime. I am so ready for a change in the weather—it’s like I’m still living on Ontario, with the snowiest December and January that most Bloomingtonians can remember. It’s been so cold that Jim and Tommie even went ice fishing yesterday, being so desperate to get out and do something. It was a mild day and nobody fell through the ice, which made the trip a success for me. On the other hand, the best we’ll do for fresh fish tonight is salmon from Kroger.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Two day school weeks

Help! The boys spent more time at home this week than they did in school. Monday brought the Martin Luther King Jr. day holiday and Tuesday was an in-service day. That brought on the usual parade of breadsticks, pizza and popcorn-snurfing kids over for play dates to fill the hours. That made me a little less productive, but I was able to keep my art projects moving forward. Luckily, in my house MLK day is also a pie holiday. The boys and I bought nine big apples, three each of ambrosia, pink lady and Sonias. I gave Jim my best ‘I need a pie very badly’ look. It worked! I had a nice week of pie and espresso for breakfast after a week of intense 6:30 am Zumba classes (thanks Liz and Cera!).

In art news, my big commission piece took a few steps forward as I worked on weaving the sky. I also started cranking on the carrots and beets during the week, which I can work on just about anywhere. The four carrots are done, and I must say that they look delightful. My completed beets needed leaves, which was an evening job this week. It was very cold several nights, and that meant fires in the fireplace. I sat in front of the flames and embers to keep my fingers warm as I worked. When the fire started to die down I called out ‘krb!’, which translates into fireplace in Czech. That brought a well-trained Jim in the living room to poke at the wood and get the fire stoked up again so I could focus. To make the leaf veins for each leaf I use somewhere between six and twelve cut remnant copper wires. Beet leaf veins require a lovely deep purple yarn, which I was lucky enough to have through a typically unusual twist of fate. When the boys were very small I ordered a few toys from an educational catalog. It also offered remnant yarn lots for sale and I bought a bunch. One of the first yarns I received was, I thought, a really awful color that I would never be able to use. Of course I didn’t know I’d have beet veins in my future. I wrapped my copper wires to create the veins, attached them to last week’s leaves and connected the leaves to the beets. Another vegetable done! Next it’s on to the onions.

Another big milestone this week for the giant veggie piece was receiving the frame. My friend and woodworker Tom Bertolacini made and delivered one of the oak frames and it looks great! My greatest concern was that it needed to be sturdy enough to support the large weaving. I’ve had problems in the past with frame-members bowing under the strain of the horizontal pieces. But Tom’s frame is made of thick oak with three central support bars. I have great confidence that it’s going to support the piece with ease.

The boys did manage to get back to school on Wednesday, even though a big storm was looming on the Wundermap. That gave me some time to have a delightful chat with my aunt and uncle, Maruska and Martin, in Pisek (in the Czech Republic). I haven’t spoken with Martin in over three years, and then the hour-long call cost me a lot of money. This time we talked using Skype and I took advantage of the internet. It’s great to be able to see each other as you speak and really connect with them. After this talk, and my Skype conversations with my aunt and uncle Mila and Pepik, and my cousins Renata and Milan in Prague over the holidays, I really have a warm and fuzzy feeling to be part of my bigger Czech family.

On Thursday the big snow hit. Of course school was called off and the boys were excited to have yet another day at home. Friday was back to school, and Saturday meant getting back into our routine with Taekwondo in the morning, a play date in the afternoon, and kluski for dinner. And next week my life gets even busier. Monday are more arts organization meetings, Tuesday at 5:30pm I’ll give a presentation at City Hall in the ArtsWorks series entitled, “Transitioning into an Art Career” and the big story about me in the Home and Lifestyles magazine should appear at the end of this week. And there are still giant onions to create!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin