The joys of eating locally…

This might not qualify as eating, but I did finish another felted tile piece this week. I’m trying to complete the series of fifteen ("Pieces of Life"), and this is number nine, "Postcards from Home." I still need to create five more canvases, which I make in batches, but my plan is to have an exhibit with the series. It’s my exploration of color and composition, so for now I’m staying with the same color palette. I think it’s warm, bright and happy. The latest version is filled with sun, sky, water and heat, which I think came from hours of fishing in blazing suns this week—more on that below. I have an exhibit booked in October at the Dunn Street location of the Bloomington Bagel Company, so that might be the big local debut for the pieces. The most important thing is that I’m really enjoying making them!

For the Father’s day weekend the crew and I traveled to Michigan to visit Grandma. We timed strawberry season just right, and we got to have strawberry shortcake for breakfast one day and lunch on another. If you’re going to indulge, do it right I say! We got the berries at the Midland Farmer’s Market—boy were they good! Grandma used great-grandma Drummond’s recipe for biscuits. The whole thing was topped with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream. What a treat! On Father’s day itself we broke out the Lila Mae, Jim’s dad’s boat, and headed out on the bay for some walleye fishing. It didn’t take long before I had a nice one in the boat. And then another! Did I say I caught the most and biggest fish that day! Of course that meant a fresh fish dinner, which we had on Monday, and the rest of the fillets were frozen for another trip to Michigan. It was good to get out on the Lila Mae, and we felt like Grandpa was fishing with us. He passed away in February, and he is greatly missed.

We came home on Tuesday, settled in a little, and I worked on my felted tile piece and making more dandelions for a weaving. Friday we ramped up for a full day, though. The morning started with an early alarm at 4:30, then off to Lake Monroe for a day of fishing for wipers with Captain Tim Hudson. He’s a very engaging fellow and we had a great time. It was one of those trips where ‘you should have been here yesterday’, but we still managed a six and an eight pound wiper first thing in the morning. We should have headed for home then, but we soldiered on for six more hours without any more action. Friday evening we washed up and headed out to see ‘If you give a mouse a cookie’. That’s the Cardinal Stage Company production of a favorite book of ours from the boy’s early childhood. It was very cleverly done with a lot of creative touches. The whole family liked it, especially the chocolate chip cookies that were on sale at the intermission. Then last night (Saturday) Jim baked some of our wiper haul. Boy, were they nice! It’s a very mild fish and went nicely with the new potatoes and corn that we picked up at our Farmer’s Market earlier that day. It was truly a delightful local meal, something we’ll certainly repeat soon with the rest of the fish.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

My week started off well, but...

This week marked my favorite meeting of the year with the Spinners and Weaver’s Guild. Monday was the auction night, when everybody brings their remnants and out-of-favor materials. Everything is sold in a fun and fast-paced auction. People there know that I’m into greens, and some assume that I’ll take anything green. I’m pretty selective, though. I only want the earthy, natural greens for my pieces, not the hideous synthetic greens that often pop up. This year I ended up buying an eclectic mixture of things, including two books that I’m really enjoying. One is a pictorial history of embroidery, and the other book is from the mid-eighties called ‘Fiber r/evolution’, and it shows a lot of interesting, cutting-edge pieces. I especially enjoy the description of each artist’s history and appreciate having a context for their art. I’m always impressed by the diversity of the materials that are incorporated into art pieces, including a description of a weaving project based on embedding sticks in the earth and weaving around them. That sounds like a great community art project to me. I also bought a whole bunch of fleece at the auction. I found some beautiful blended wool and alpaca roving that will work well in my current pieces, and I even bought some stinky still-to-be-skirted fleece, with untrimmed burrs and poopie remnants still stuck on. That’ll be a fun project for this summer.

Another book that I picked up this week was “Seven Days in the Art World’ by Sarah Thornton. It has a quote from Leslie Dick that resonated with me: “[as artists we] are materializing—taking something from the inside and putting it out into the world so we can be relieved of it.” I can really relate to that, especially with my current body of work. In my own world of art, I had a highly productive week making more abstract tiles. The basic layout and color palette is still the same, with defined zones delineated in black wool and filled with earthy colors. When I looked back at my first piece of the week I decided that I must have been channeling trips to the beach in North Carolina, because I could see a lighthouse, grasses and the beach. It’s fun showing them to my family, since each family member has a different idea about the ‘right’ orientation for the square pieces. Never mind how I laid them out and what I was thinking! The funny thing is, sometimes the pieces do look better, or certainly different, when viewed a different way. A lot of life is like that.

Just when I thought everything was going great this week, WHAM! A nasty stomach flu got through to me. I had stomach cramps and fever that kept me in bed a lot of the time and totally lacking any energy. I ended up having to cancel a workshop scheduled for Thursday, but I’ll make it up sometime in June. I had everything organized, packed and ready to go, and I felt terrible about not being able to do it, but I was still running a fever and having cramps. The good news is that I’m now done with yogurt, toast and chamomile tea as my sole diet. I think I’ll even be ready for coffee by Sunday! I think the hardest part of the whole process has been opening the refrigerator and seeing the last piece of a tasty rhubarb pie sitting there. It was one of Jim’s best efforts, and the rhubarb was grown in the neighborhood by our friend Mary-the-neonate nurse. Don’t worry, and don’t bother coming over--I’m sure it won’t last another day! Take care and enjoy your health!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

The empirical artist

This was an exciting week of experimentation. I stepped out of my comfort zone of weaving and representational art to focus on some new abstract pieces. I generally don’t do abstract pieces, and not all my early abstract weavings came out as well as I’d hoped. It was too much to develop both the weaving style I wanted and the piece composition. Because I’ve done so much lately with ornaments and scarves over the past two years I’ve had a chance to develop both needle and wet felting techniques, and I’ve had a chance to play with some basic designs and patterns. I’ve been eager to take those ideas and really focus on composition of pieces. My plan was to use the soft-frame technique I developed for the ‘Shhhh, the Trees are Sleeping’ series on a wet felted canvas. That would be my blank slate to start developing some pieces. I started out by looking at lot of images on the web to decide on the kinds of things I liked and what I might be able to create. I settled on a color palate that was warm and earthy, which dovetailed nicely with my latest attempts at dyeing with natural materials. In the newest pieces I’ve been playing with repeating colors in different parts of the piece. It’s one of my strategies to tie the zones and design elements of the pieces together. I found that I can get really nice harmonies by layering a second dyed fleece on top of the repeated color so the repeats aren’t exact. I also like creating gradients with a color to extend and blend zones. I think that strategy really helps unify the pieces, and I’m quite proud of my first attempts!

One of the things that makes my latest project especially rewarding is that I get to play with some new dyeing techniques. One of my big successes from last year was the soft yellow I got from dandelion heads I collected with my boys at Bryan Park. Somehow collecting things with my family is a big part of the success of the process. When we were in Michigan last weekend, Tommie and I collected a huge bag full of bright red sumac heads, so this week I got out the dye pots and got to work. I was about to launch into my standard approach to getting colors of out of natural materials, best summarized by my late father-in-law as: “cook ‘em like kidneys”. That translates into boiling them hard for an hour. However, I recently read a great book about dyeing with natural materials (Eco colour - Botanical dyes for beautiful textiles by India Flint) that says that the type of pot (aluminum vs. enamel) and the time of heating could make a big difference in the intensity and exact color. That’s about when I thought: heeyyyy, I love to do experiments! So I clipped the berries from the stems and divided them into small, equal samples, in equal volumes. I boiled some for 15 minutes and others for an hour, and I did it in either aluminum or enamel dye pots. It turns out that with red sumac it just doesn’t matter—you get the same color every time. What I did learn, though, was that including the stems has a big effect on the overall color. Boiling stems and berries leads to a much browner color, but boiling the stems and leaf parts together gave me a wonderful soft yellow green. The berries themselves didn’t give the intense red color I had originally hoped, but they did give a seductive earthy red. I just know both colors are going to find their way into my next piece! I guess the lesson of the story this week is that you can take the scientist out of the lab, but you can take the scientist out of the artist.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin