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

Thunderstorm, thunderstorm, go away

My week started off with a few bangs. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all in the art world. A thunderstorm moved through the area and the winds knocked off a large, high branch across the road. Luckily, it fell mostly on the power line and less on the house, but of course that meant we lost power. Sunday night the same thing happened: a new branch but the same house. I also saw lightning strike the transformer, and wow! What a show! It looked like a fourth of July firework with sparks flying all over the neighborhood. This time the power was out all night, and we had to listen to the crews doing the repairs and cutting up the trees all night through the open windows. The bright spot was the fact that the back-up, battery powered sump pump came through and sent the flash flood streaming back out of the house. I took the precaution of lifting all of my loose yarn and works-in-progress up off of the carpet in my art studio, but happily, all stayed snug and dry. The whole experience inspired me to invest in a hand-crank radio for just such emergencies—now I need a hand-crank computer!

By candlelight, I managed to finish another felted tile piece. I really like how it turned out, and it’s hanging in the kitchen to get some exposure before it meets its public at my next art fair in Madison, Wisconsin. The bad news is that I managed to poke myself with my multi-pronged felting needle pretty badly, which I washed and treated with antibiotics as well as I could. I’d like to avoid doing that again! At least I got to release a little of the Czech vocabulary I don’t get to use much.

If it wasn’t injuries, it was art back pedaling. I went to Wonderlab to finish off the butterfly piece, which was a community art piece I helped organize over the winter. The Wonderlab volunteers painted over three thousand wine corks collected from around town; thank you, Bloomington oenophiles! One Saturday afternoon the museum attendees glued the blue yellow, and black colored corks onto the design I created of an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. This week I tried to paint on some details, but that turned out to be a terrible idea. I ended up painting over all of my efforts and declaring it complete, which is one of the great things about being an artist—you decide when the piece is done! Now the ever helpful, resourceful and cheerful Andrea is sealing it with urethane, and soon it should be hanging on the bee-line trail (I’m sure they misnamed it).

There are some new things to look for in the local art scene. I went to the library last week and yet another person asked me to do an ornament workshop, so I’ll be organizing something in the Bloomington area in October—drop me an e-mail if you want to be put on a notification list when the planning does come together. I also finalized plans for an exhibit in Valparaiso, Indiana this summer and fall. The opening of the new galley art center on the Fourth of July will include some of my ‘Shhh… the trees are sleeping’ pieces, and I’ll have blank notecards there as well. Then there will be a larger exhibit of my work for their full opening in mid-September. I’m looking forward to heading up there in the middle of August to see the new gallery space and give a talk. I’ll post the details when I have everything settled.

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

The week I had to use my opera voice

As Saturday’s go, today is a little more relaxing than the last one, when I was in the middle of the Art Fair in Columbus Ohio. I had to spend a little time excavating in the house on Monday—I knew the kitchen was underneath all that stuff! There’s rarely any rest for the artist, especially when school is out, and this week I had to finish preparation for a workshop in Danville Indiana on Wednesday. I made the boys, aka my workshop documentarians, pack up their self-entertainment bag the night before and we all got to bed early. By eight o’clock we were dressed, fed, and on the road to Danville, art supplies in tow. I had a wonderful few hours with an enthusiastic crew there, and it didn’t seem possible that it was time to go at noon. Everyone was still poking away, and the boys were still playing Yu-gi-oh. Or should I say oh-oh—they forgot to take pictures of the workshop! So with apologies, I don’t have any nice pictures to show of the event. I’m going to have to insert some of the needle felting work, one of the new Pieces of Life series, that I did in my own quiet moments during the week. Anyway, things went so well that we’ve already scheduled another workshop for a Saturday in October to include the people who couldn’t attend Tuesday’s session. And an alert to Pat and Nancy at Sheep Street: they have vowed to descend on your store to stock up on fleece and needles!

My next big event was a reception for the ‘Touching Summer’ show I hung in Columbus Indiana last week. Hotel Indigo, which is hosting the show, is such a vibrant place to have an art exhibit. My hat is off to the Arts Council for their efforts to keep shows hanging without a brick and mortar home right now, with the Columbus Commons being rebuilt. The Hotel Indigo in Columbus is a fabulous arts space, with lots of light and color around. It doesn’t feel like any conventional hotel that you might walk into. The food was good, although they didn’t have the brownies necessary to hold the complete attention of the boys. There was also a really nice full-page spread in the Columbus paper, The Republic, although it’s hidden behind a subscription firewall if you want to read it. However, the big picture on the top of the page is accessible. And I have a nice one from the reception that I’ve posted here. I got home around eight, just in time for a beer and some interesting new swirly chips I found at Trader Joe’s on my trip through Indianapolis on our way home from the workshop in Danville.

Last, you may think of me just as an arts diva, loving mom and Midwest traveler, but I have other roles as well. On Friday, a deer snuck into our back yard. It was making a calculated and cunning trek to the big bed of lilies in the middle, trying to look inconspicuous. After last year, I know that if the deer mowed down the lilies, it would have been a crushing blow to my hubby, so I leapt into action. I tried scolding, without effect, so I grabbed some pieces of wood by the door to pitch at the deer. Still nothing but munch, munch munch. I contemplated getting some pots and pans to try my ‘anti-bear in the campsite strategy’ that I learned in Canada, but I found that I just had to bring out my opera voice and add a few loud claps. My grandfather was a bass in the Czech opera, so I come by that honestly. Anyway, that did the trick and the lilies are safe for now, and I was a hero when Jim came home. Now do I get a pie?

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

The new world explorer discovers Columbus

I had yet another jam-packed week. I started out by preparing for my assaults on the every town named Columbus between Bloomington and New York (and New York had better watch out too!). The boys had their last day of school, which meant I had one last window of freedom to get things done until August. I started out by convincing my photographer, Tom Bertolacini, to come into town to do a quick photo shoot of my newest work before it left the studio. I also printed (thanks White Rabbit!) and packaged my note cards for upcoming shows. For that I got some help from the boys, who pack them in wrappers and put the price tag stickers on. All for a reasonable fee, of course, that will either go to Yu-gi-oh cards or a new pack of silly bands. On Wednesday I packed up some of my bigger pieces for an exhibit in the Phi Gallery at the Hotel Indigo in Columbus Indiana. While I was in town I did an interview with The Republic newspaper, which I think will be published in Thursday's paper. After a stop for ice cream at Zaharanko’s (a set-up tax for the boy’s cooperation) we raced back to Bloomington for dinner and packed up the monster rental van with all my art fair stuff. On Thursday morning we set out for the Columbus Arts Festival in Ohio under pretty blue skies. The set-up went smoothly, and I have to say that it was a beautifully organized show. I was impressed with the show coordination, the helpful and ubiquitous volunteers, the artist support facilities and the show planning efforts that made everything go smoothly. It’s an artists dream to participate in a show that well organized, especially for its size. The only thing that didn’t go as planned was the weather. Friday was off-and-on rainy, with storms in the distance. Saturday was dampened by torrential rains and thunderstorms that shut down the show for a couple of hours, but the booth held together and kept me dry. The worst part was that I left my needle-felting supplies at home so I didn’t have anything to work on. By late afternoon the weather cleared and the crowds came back. I had a lot of very interesting conversations, including some with former Bloomingtonians and people with some connection to my hometown. I’ve even ended up in someone else’s blog! One of the highlights was meeting a group of fiber artists from Cincinnati who said that drove up just to see my work—I felt so honored! We talked about the possibility of putting together a workshop next year, and I’m getting some ideas together for topics.

Of course, any show I do involves the travails of my road crew. They bring me food and keep me entertained with trick scooter riding and stories. While I watched the threatening skies on Friday, they partied at the Zoombezi Bay water park at the Columbus Zoo. They body surfed in the wave pool, rode the tubes in the lazy river, and defied certain death on the huge waterslides. The next day they went to the CoSI, the Columbus museum of Science and Industry, which was an easy scooter ride from the fair. I’m told the boys ran around like crazy and explored all the exhibits, wearing out their father in the chase plane. At least I got some of the leftover cheese pizza from lunch. On Sunday we packed up the moment the show closed and were back on the road by about 7:30. Everybody except the driver fell asleep on the way home (good job, Jim!), and we were all sound asleep in our own beds by midnight. To top off my adventures in Columbus, on Monday the boys and I had to drive back to Columbus Indiana to tie up a few odds and ends for the exhibit and the opening reception for "Touching Summer" which is on Thursday June 10 from 5:30 - 7 at the Phi Gallery in Hotel Indigo.

For now, I’m happy to be back home, enjoying the lilies flowering in the yard and gearing up to start a commission for a red-eyed tree frog piece for a patron in Columbus. Now that everything is done I’m looking for a celebratory dinner—I wonder if I’ll get pie!

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

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