Salamander Chili?

This week has been a needle-felting fiesta. I created enough felted peppers to make a fine chili, and my ‘Salamander Salsa’ is coming together nicely. The pepper piece needs about fifty peppers of all colors—reds, greens, yellows, and oranges. For the composition, I’m channeling a late-summer basket of peppers from our local CSA. I just have to remember not to rub my eyes after I cut them up. To make the basic pepper shape I’ve been wet-felting merino noils, the same technique I used with the kids in the Creek-Love classroom to create felt balls. I’m using a bamboo mat that I picked up at the recycle center to do the rolling, and the soap is an environmentally friendly dish soap that my thoughtful husband picked up for me. I haven’t checked, but I’m sure the seeds are in there! Anyway, to introduce the color I add roving or fleece onto the surface by needle felting. To get the perfect pepper green I use the amazing green fibers that I bought at the Fiber Event in Greencastle—I especially love the mohair that I found because it’s a rich green and very shiny. I use the drum carder borrowed from the Spinners and Weaver’s guild to get just the right color blend. It’s a fun tool to use, but it looks like an instrument of great pain if some part of you got caught in it. The ability to mix and create specific colors lets me create the perfect green for different types of peppers at different stages of development. I’m up to 34, so I’ve still got a few more to go. This is about the stage where I start wondering what in the world I was thinking when I started this project!

My other major project has involves birthing a few more salamanders. I finished my yellow barred salamander and I set off on making the body of a red striped salamander. He’s waiting for me to add his arms and legs, which is the tedious part. You know, when it comes right down to it, salamander bodies look a lot like peppers! I need to start a new project. The only thing that made the poking palatable on Thursday, which was a big needle felting day, was the fact that there was a marathon of ‘Project Runway’ episodes. I just love the creativity that goes into the compositions. I like the fact that the fashion designs incorporate colors, textures, dimensionality movement and personality. I get great ideas for my own art pieces, and they inspire me to greater heights for next year’s Trashionista fashion show. I can’t wait!

On the home front, the boy’s tested for the purple belt with a black stripe. It’s their seventh belt (ten more to go to black belt!). They’re jumping around like frogs in the spring, spinning like tops, and kicking like, well, like they did when they were in the womb. Now I know what they were practicing for! Afterwards we headed down the sidewalk to Jiffy Treet for a little cool and refreshing reward. Jacob and his dad shared the chocolate lovers sundae, a decadent treat with chocolate ice cream, brownies, hot fudge sauce, whipping cream and nuts. I did get the cherry on top. Tommie and I were much more reserved, each getting a small dish of ice cream. At least half of us show some restraint. It was a delightful end to another fine week.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

The days are just packed

Could I possibly have packed any more excitement into this week? Should I start with the rhubarb pie? No, I should start with Monday when I loaded up all my art and headed to Indianapolis. I was invited to give a lecture to the Embroidery Guild in Indianapolis. I took my scarves, ornaments, tools, and all my weavings that weren’t hanging somewhere. I even dug out my first exploratory pieces and took one off the wall that I made before I was working artist. The talk was intended to cover my history as an artist and the influences that helped shape me. One of the great things about giving talks like this is that I get to both re-live and observe my evolution as an artist. I’m reminded of how much I enjoy what I do! It’s fun to see the different design and structural landmarks that define different turning points in my career. What made the trip, though, was that my audience was just great! They asked a lot of questions at the end, which is one of my markers for success. It was also nice to see such a range of ages—they clearly have a vibrant and engaged group. To top it all off, the talk coincided with the last of the redbuds and the emergence of the dogwood flowers so the drive was pleasant too.

Tuesday was eighty and sunny, and that brought on a fishing trip to Lake Monroe with my dear husband and son Tommie. Jacob went over to a friend’s house for play and pizza until eight. We zipped over to the Pinegrove launch area after school, put in the canoe, and headed straight to the secret crappie location we discovered last year. The crappies didn’t really cooperate, but we ended up catching all the catfish we could hope for. I tried hard to catch crappies—I really did—but somehow the catfish always seem to find me. We even managed to lose a really big fish that was on for a while before giving us a big splash as it snapped the line and swam away. To be social we invited the fish to come home for a fish fry on Thursday. Fishing aside, though, we had a really nice time paddling on the lake as the sun set.

Wednesday brought a different challenge. It was the day that the Fourth Street Art Fair committee met to review the 450 applicants we had this year, which is a record. I was partial to the fiber category works, some of which were truly stunning. The paintings were also awesome this year—there were lots of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the committee. We’re a pretty tough crowd, so you’ll have to come to the Fourth Street fair this year and see what we have on display.

Thursday was an eventful day for me in the art studio. I launched into heavy-duty mode to finish my piece for the Edible Lotus fundraiser dinner. Time is getting short so I had to really put some effort into my piece. I had first envisioned a tree in the fog, which evolved into a jeweled tree. I like the symbolism of the tree for community art projects, such as the community tree that I organized two years ago for the Fourth Street children’s booth. In that project, each leaf was an individual art piece created by visitors to the fair, decorated with recycled and recovered materials. The whole Lotus Festival concept reminds me of that tree, because it depends on the contributions of a huge number of volunteers like the tireless Deborah Klein, local paper artist extraordinaire. Anyway, you have to understand that the project has been very stressful for me because of the deadline. Any time you try to convert an idea into a three-dimensional piece you just don’t know when (or whether) it will really come together. Sometimes ideas work better in your head than on the canvas. When you have a deadline that’s a bad thing and it was starting to weigh on me.

The concept for the piece itself is a three-dimensional tree that is intended to hang above a table. It needs to be very light because, like the old joke, if a tree falls on a donor, everybody notices it. To solve the problem I turned to my newest and lightest medium, the recovered dryer sheet. I’ve had people collecting them for me to add to my personal stack. They’re airy and light, and somehow that works with the airiness I intended to circle around the tree itself. I sewed the dryer sheets together and gave them an evening coat of white paint. Then I painted on the tree with fabric paint and acrylic paint straight out of the tube to create the weight of the tree. I like how it turned out—the tree has the look and feel of worn leather and it contrasts nicely with the lightness of the dryer sheets. The swirly branch designs remind me of the patterns in my ornaments, which is something I noticed when I gave the talk. There’s just something very appealing to me about that design, something wholesome about the round swirling patterns. For the jeweled leaves I was inspired by a Monet print we have in our living room that has deep purples and greens, like jewels in the deep blue water. I thought that the richness of the colors somehow matched the richness of the Lotus festival music. I searched my stores of felt scraps for little pieces that I just couldn’t throw away and found some real treasures. I cut and cut and cut some more to create my small leaves, and I managed to dull a pair of my favorite scissors in the process. Luckily, I have three more pairs (always be prepared!). A new pair of scissors will soon appear in the family collection and the boys will be happy. Use ‘em and lose ‘em seems to be their motto. The last step will be to glue the panels onto the wooden supports, and until then I’m holding my breath. If it all comes together I’ll post it on my Facebook page.

Since there’s no rest for the weary mom, Friday was a busy family day. I stopped in to see Jacob’s dinosaur project at school, took the boy’s to their Tae Kwon Do class, brought them back home for a snack and then off we went to the Rogers-Binford school carnival. I baked and decorated a cake for the cakewalk that was quickly claimed as a prize—at least I saw it in someone’s arms shortly after we got there and sat down for pizza. We bought some books, played some games, ate some candy, dyed four lips blue or red with wretched snow cone colors, watched karyoke as we waited to win a big prize at the raffle, and chatted with parents and friends. But that wasn’t enough for one day or week! We packed up and zipped off to the Musical Arts Center to see West Side Story that night. The performance was excellent, as usual, and the boys are now ready for the next theatrical event in town—the Cardinal Stage Company is putting on the ‘Little Shop of Horrors’.

Saturday started off with a trip to the farmer’s market, then the house turned into a madhouse with friends of the boys over. A little gardening got done and a few flowers planted, then the day gave way to dinner featuring warm fresh flatbread with garlic and cheese spread and a nice Argentinian pinot noir. And since fresh rhubarb was on display at the farmer’s market, I used all my secret strategies to get my dear husband to buy rhubarb and bake me a pie this morning! There isn’t much better than warm pie with whipping cream on a Sunday morning with a nice cup of tea! Did I say I like pie? Plus, the best news of all: this week it all starts over again! Only the adventures, pies and type of wine seem to change!

Until next week...

Martina Celerin

Yellow

If you’ve ever driven through a neighborhood where the lawn was a solid, lush monoculture of well-bred grass seeds, well, that wasn’t our neighborhood, and it certainly wasn’t our lawn. I sometimes wonder if the lush lawn society harbors a certain paranoia that the weeds are watching them. The dandelions would take the lead in filling yards with yellow monitoring devices. After a while they turn into communications devices, spreading seeds to all the neighbor yards. It’s especially hard to infiltrate lawns laced with pesticides and patrolled by curmudgeons with bludgeons, but dandelions are fearless. I’ll admit it—they’ve won me over. I love to see them in lawns. They’re such a pretty yellow, and spring is such a yellow flower season. And they really are determined and fearless, ready to establish and prosper anywhere. Those are admirable qualities in anyone. I took a few pictures this week to show some of my favorite yellow friends to show what I mean.

Of course if you know me at all, you know that what captures my imagination in life ends up in my work. I decided this week to work on a piece called ‘Lawn Flowers’. I’ve done a similar piece that was popular and the composition made me happy, so I decided it was time to re-imagine the dandelion as beauty in the lawn. I pulled out my wonderful crunchy spring green yarns to start. For a moment I wasn’t sure if I should weave or make a salad. I’m envisioning a thick green base, as if you’re looking at the lawn from an angle, with three clumps of dandelions flowering. In a perfect coincidence, I ran into my friend Bonnie Gordon-Lucas at Bloomingfoods this week and had a spontaneous lunch date. The lunch was good, but she was concerned that I should be incorporating some reds and yellows into my green grass. We also bonded on the wonderful spring green colors that you can only see this time of year. If you look closely at the emerging foliage you can see the rich, iridescent greens that seem to darken as the summer goes on. We science geeks know that the leaves start to produce anthocyanin pigments to absorb the intense sunlight of summer, and those “non-green” pigments mask the spring beauty. Enjoy it while you can!

Speaking of yellow, I’ve been working on the fourth salamander for my ‘Salamander Salsa’ piece. Perhaps it’s subconscious, but I decided to make a Barred Tiger Salamander. He’s bright yellow with a black barring pattern, kind of like a tiger, only less orange and feline and more yellow and amphibian. So far I’ve only made the body, so he isn’t much of a threat to run away until I can add his legs. The ones I’ve made are more mobile, so I have to keep a closer eye on them. I don’t dare take them anywhere any more. So now I’m sitting at four-salamander salsa and waiting for two more guests.

The last big news is that this week was the Fiber Event in Greencastle. I carpooled there with Ruth Rives, a sweet friend with firm opinions. She recently started weaving and is really enjoying it. Overall, we had a delightful drive through the country on a warm and sunny spring day. We ended up spending several hours at the fair, longer than we expected, poking around in all the piles of fleece and yarns. I couldn’t wait to get home to start mixing green fleece with the drum carder I borrowed from the Spinners and Weaver’s guild. I’m trying to get just the right dark green for the dandelion foliage. And speaking of pleasant drives through the country, I also went to a reception for the recycled art show hanging the new Hotel Indigo in Columbus Indiana. The show looks great (stop by if your in the neighborhood!) and the reception was nice…thanks, Marilyn. It was followed by a fun visit to the recently re-opened ice cream parlor, Zaharakos. I got to see the massive musical instrument, the Welte orchestrion and sit at the marble bar. It felt like you were in a 1950s movie to see all the little spigots for soda. I had some nice conversations over a grilled cheese sandwich and a fruit cup. I forced myself to try and ignore the most amazing banana split walking past me, as well as all the other old fashioned ice cream treats. The good news is that I have two boys who will accompany me there in the summer to help me decide which to try first.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

How to turn oak into fruitwood...

The weather this week in Bloomington was glorious: the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the bulbs were bursting. We even topped 80 degrees at the end of the week, warm enough to open doors and windows to let in the spring. After a long, cold winter, what does spring mean around here? Yes, it’s time to start staining frames! I always have a few projects that need temperatures over fifty for paints, sealants or other finishes to work properly. I’m starting to back up on weavings and need frame homes for them. So first I dusted off my power tools and did a little spot sanding. My friend and photographer Tom Bertolocini makes oak frames to my specifications and I stain them to match my weavings. This week I got out a dark oak, a colonial maple and a lighter fruitwood stain. Don’t ask me what fruitwood is. I just know that when I put it on oak frame I get a range of light finishes that work with a lot of my pieces. I can finish a frame and hold it to the piece and decide exactly which finish I like best. It’s sort of like holding up my socks against a pair of pants to see how I like the match. If a certain frame finish really doesn’t work, back out to the veranda it goes and out comes the black spray paint!

I also have some big electronic news from the week. I joined the twenty-first century, aka Facebook. I was amazed at how easy it is to get connected and start talking to people. It’s been good to connect with a lot of people I’ve lost touch with over the years. I must seem to be getting older, because some of my local art buds were shocked that I did it. While it’s great to know what everyone is doing, I can see how someone could spend a lot of time keeping up with her friends, new and old. There’s also kind of a weird voyeuristic aspect to it all. You get to read about things that a person might not tell you, based on your own sensibilities, but they might tell another friend. You’re going where? Are you sure that’s a good idea?

In the salamander world, we now have a party. You can almost see them together in the waiting area at Red Lobster: ‘Salamanders, party of three—your table’s ready’. My latest creation is a cave salamander. It isn’t white, like you might expect from a dweller in the back of the cave. It lives at the openings and it’s a lovely papaya color with tiny black spots. She joins her friends the black spotted and mud salamander. I’m planning on having six salamanders for a salsa, but the weaving might take seven. Six is my favorite number, and six is a lot less salamander creation than seven, so I’m rooting for six but then seven is a better number artistically. They should be ready for the summer art tour, which is going to be a college town circuit. So far I’ll be in Columbus, OH in June, Madison, WI in July and here in Bloomington in September. I hope to see you somewhere this year!

Finally, this is a major flowering season in the yard. My first Facebook post reported the first tulip that burst into color in the yard. It just made me so happy to see it. It was red, of course, and it came up right in the middle of the herb garden. The herbs get their chance to shine later in the year. We’ve got deer candy—oops, I mean tulip buds—appearing all over the yard. The best part is that I’ve forgotten what colors I bought last year. Sometimes I’m like Dory in Finding Nemo for stuff like that. I find that life’s a lot more fun when it’s generally good and you get to keep reliving the best episodes! I’ve also got my bulldog husband out spraying the emerging tender greenery with his own anti-deer blend spray. So far so good! And I’ve done my part, although it isn’t for the flowers. I still hear our local raccoon climbing on the roof in the middle of the night, but now he’s clearly on the outside looking in. I just curl up, my eyes still closed, and smile a big warm smile.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Swimming with the Stone Fish

After my adventure to the lake last weekend I’ve had fish and fossils floating through my mind. I felt inspired to take out my extensive collection of all things rock: geodes, crinoids, fossils and other random stone treasures. I had a very nice time sorting my collection, since that brings a sense of order to my mind and my work. It’s something like spring housecleaning, except that you don’t need to discover all the places your boys marked up the walls or left scraps of food someplace out of sight. The natural result of such an endeavor was that I decided to launch into a weaving that included various fossils and crinoids. My new Stone Fish piece is taking shape! As I sorted my crinoids based on size I really enjoyed the spectrum of colors. There’s a lot of geology happening in southern Indiana, whether you notice it or not. When it’s all laid out in front of you the range of red, brown and sand tones on the rocks is amazing. It’s kind of like people or flowers I suppose. You can start with the same basic design, but depending on much light they get, and how much rain falls on them, and who their neighbors are, you can see a lot of variation. Anyway, in my world of deciding on composition for a weaving, contrast and comparison took center stage. I pulled out my boxes of yarns in complementing colors for the project. Out came my light brown and sand tones, then my earthy greens and oranges. The stone and the yarn make the ultimate contrast: the old and the new, the inorganic and the organic, and the hard and the soft. To my husband the fisherman, one is more like a sinker and the other more of a dry fly.

With the materials and composition ideas in mind, the weaving process itself is also very Zen-like. The colors flow as they undulate into the background, very much like the layers of soil and rock in the surrounding hills. The crinoids line the layers, but now they’re wired into place instead of being deposited in an organic sea millions of years ago. Cozying up to the yarn probably reminds them of their organic origins long ago. It’s amazing what bubbles up from your subconscious as you weave! To create the stone fish I pulled out some fern fossils that Rudy Turner, a microscopist at Indiana University gave me. The fossil patterns, set on their side, look a lot like a fish skeleton set into a flesh of sandstone. I like that feature for creating the body. I’m still looking for the perfect fish head, though. I spent an hour or so yesterday scouring the Jackson Creek bed for a perfect fossil but I’m afraid I came up empty. The boys chased water striders, minnows and crayfish through the shallows, while avoiding the leeches and garter snake they came across, so it was a good day overall. For the fitting end to the day, my husband carried out my morning wish to have a fish dinner. He brought two frozen Mahi Mahi chunks back to life with a marinade of ginger and balsamic vinegar, plus a little garlic and honey. Very tasty! Thank goodness not every fish is destined to be a fossil.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

The Week of Tylenol

I had a full and delightful week. This was spring break week in Indiana, so the crew and I packed up and we drove north to see Grandma in Michigan. The first highlight was the rhubarb pie my loving husband made, using the two pounds of rhubarb I packed. Of course nothing ever turns out quite as planned. We didn’t have quite enough rhubarb, so in went an apple and some frozen strawberries. The baker made a slight error and used self-rising flour for the crust and over-filled it with filling. Everything got bigger; the crust rose up and the filling bubbled out. It turned out to be a tasty creation, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a pie. I also never miss a chance to scout out new supply stores, so I visited the Northwoods Outlet store in Pinconning and Larson’s Salvage in Bay City. I found lots of useful stuff but no brass flashing, a key secret ingredient in fern leaves. It also turned out that during our trip the last of the snow melted in Kawkawlin, so on our last day we got into picking up sticks with Grandma. That event signals the exit of winter. One cleans up the worst that Michigan’s snow, ice and wind deal out between Halloween and St. Patrick’s day. I was pretty sore on the drive home, but that’s part of the adventure.

Our return to Indiana was marked by trees beginning to bud and the first daffodils coming out. We left the forests in winter mode, but on the drive back we could see the subtle pinks of budding trees on the horizons and the yellows of willow in the low areas. During the drive I put the last touches on my black salamander with yellow spots and fleshed out my mud salamander. Now he has arms and is ready to crawl around my art studio. The background for the piece is already finished, so he has a home when he’s ready for it. When we pulled up to the big yellow house we were greeted by the iris reticulata, which have a beautiful deep, rich purple and elegant yellow markings. They burst through the carpet of leaves that my loving and well-intentioned husband meant to remove last fall but didn’t. The leaves probably gave that little extra bit of protection that carried them through the last cold spell. That’s one secret to a good marriage: a wise spouse learns to rationalize their partner’s failings as strengths that probably turn out for the best. If you’re smiling too you appreciate what that means.

I did have one job to do when we got home. We’ve had a raccoon that defeated the last home security system we installed. He found a way to burrow between two layers of wire mesh that weren’t well connected over the soffit on the east end of the attic. There’s nothing more upsetting to a good night’s sleep than hearing a raccoon creak his way into your house, slide down the trusses over your bed, rearrange your insulation and plunk down for a good day’s sleep right above you. Did I mention that this happens at 5 a.m.? If you’re lucky you get to hear him go out around 11, too, although his egress is slightly less offensive. I’m sure they have food and sex on their minds so they’re eager to get out. Anyway, after more serious but failed attempts to capture him in a live trap outside (thanks for the extra trap, Cappi!) we decided to be a little more devious. We waited until he was outside, then before he could settle back in for his morning snooze I climbed into the attic. I was armed with hammer, nails, wire mesh, wire snippers, flashlight and a mask. It’s always a bit of a stretch and shimmy to get through the small hole into the attic, then an uncomfortable crawl on hands and knees using the trusses spaced every foot or so. I cut up my mesh to fit the opening then started nailing it up with every nail I had. The work was especially challenging because I couldn’t make full swings with the hammer, so each try included a hit on the nail and a hit on the preceding truss on the backswing. After an hour of that I was ready to get back to the light and clean air, desperately hoping that we hadn’t trapped the critter inside. So far so good—no scratching last night, and no thumping around this morning. The bad news is that I’m paying for it now—all my hammering muscles are screaming out to me, so it’s back for more Tylenol.

Yesterday was a beautiful day, sunny and seventy, which means a perfect day for collecting. I went along on a family fishing trip to lake Monroe. The crew was looking for crappies, which they found along with a small bass, but I was looking for a stone fish head and tail for a weaving. Well, not actually stone fossils, but good enough replicas to capture my imagination. Stone elements make a nice contrast with the fibers in the weaving, and I like including collected fossils and rocks in pieces. I found what I was looking for and I found the beautiful bones of a small mammal. They were bleached white from the freeze/thaw cycles of winter and the water and sunshine of spring. The cleaning process was probably enhanced a bit by a few little critters along the way. Despite their appearance, I need to find just the right compositional idea for a piece to include them because my loving spouse cringes every time I mention using bones. It’ll just be our little secret when I put them in and we’ll see if he notices.

Finally, the real headache of the week is just coming on. It’s that time of year when I have to sift through all my business records to come up with the numbers for my tax forms. Oh joy. At the same time I downloaded the forms I need to become a citizen, which is a big step for me. I now know that not every American has a gun, and that Bloomington is a wonderful oasis for an artist like me. Plus, I’ll get to vote! Watch out world!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Chameleon Conga and Salamander Salsa

My life and art seem to revolve around my friends in Bloomington, Indiana. I live in a community rich in resources of all kinds that help me flourish, and I’ve come to deeply appreciate what I have. For example, this was ‘chameleon week’ for me, courtesy of one of my benefactors, the Monroe County Public Library. I went to the kids section to find picture books with big, brightly colored images of my quarry. I found a treasure trove of books to help me on my way, including a picture of a nice pardalis chameleon. To create its body, I searched through my materials only to find that some evil spell-casting wood sprite had transformed a ball of my fleece into a parsnip. Oh wait—that was me! The parsnip didn’t fit into my veggie piece, so I transformed the parsnip into the body of a chameleon. I keep everything I make, since you never know when something important will turnip. Sorry, my kids are into bad jokes right now and I couldn’t resist. I also pulled out all my green fleeces that I dyed last year and a dark brown natural fleece that fit in nicely and set to work. I put the last touches on it while listening to the proceedings of the Fourth Street Art Festival committee meeting, surrounded by local artists and craftspeople who are all committed to the success of the local art scene. As you can see in the picture, I then let the chameleon run around my art studio and inspect my yarns before she settled down among her home ferns. I hope somebody likes her as much as I do.

Well, I figure that if I can make chameleons out of turnips, I can turn amphibians into salsa. More precisely, I’m now off making six salamanders to dance together in my next piece, ‘Salamander Salsa’. I picked up a few colorful books from, you guessed it, the Monroe County Public Library. The variety of colors palates for salamanders is truly amazing. I’ve completed the first dancer, a spotted salamander, which is a rich, rich black color with yellow spots. Now I’m working on a mud salamander, whose name fails to capture its beautiful bright red color with tiny black spots. They always seem to be standing on sphagnum moss beds so I’ll have to whip up some moss for this piece too. This project will take a little time to bring together, since my three-dimensional animals always take more effort than I imagined.

The other big event on my calendar this week was the DBI (Downtown Bloomington Inc) annual awards ceremony. It was well attended, and I got to chitty chatty with lots of downtown business people. It’s so nice to see how cohesive and well-supported the downtown community is. This is a community that wisely values the vitality of its downtown, which is succeeding where other downtowns are failing in this tough economic market. I’ve benefitted from a number of downtown businesses showing my art over the years, with big thanks to places such as the Wandering Turtle, By Hand Gallery, Bloomingfoods and the Bloomington Bagel Company. I feel like I’m part of a vibrant community, and I like that feeling. Bloomington feels like home.

Until next week,


Martina Celerin