It’s up!

My newest exhibit (Migrations: Where have you been and what have you seen) is hanging at the Bloomington Playwright’s project until June 9^th.  The doors are open from 9-5 and longer on performance evenings.  It’s wonderful to have only this new set of fifteen pieces featuring migrating creatures all together, which makes the exhibit feel very cohesive.  In my studio they have to share wall space with the rest of my art pieces.  Nancy Riggert helped me transport the Migration pieces and hang the show, and in the process I realized I never posted an image of the completed ‘Stitch in Time’ weaving, so I thought I would share that here.  It was great fun collecting all of the sewing notions for the piece.  

Some are old ones that I’ve had for years, while others were discovered on recent scrounging adventures.  The featured red headed weaver bird is making an elaborate woven nest out of found objects, and of course threads and yarns are the ideal weft, even for a bird.  All of the elements just live together happily in the space.

One of the hats that I sometimes have to wear besides artist is exhibit curator to develop stories within my pieces in an exhibit.  Normally I focus on objects within a piece, but curating a show makes me consider how completed pieces interact with each other.  The challenge is arranging art pieces, some with shared elements and others quite disparate, into a flow that develops as you gaze or walk along a series of pieces.  I want your eye and your brain to create a story from beginning to end.  

For my water exhibit there was a natural progression from single droplet that led to an ocean, but in this case I hadn’t yet physically isolated the migration series from the rest of my art.  Some of the progression elements might draw you through seasons, from bleak winter through full summer.  You will see color and style progressions, as well as some of the deeper cultural themes that underscored the genesis of this exhibit in these difficult times for human migrants.

Concluding and hanging this body of work was a cause for celebration, but it has to be a quick one because I’m off to a show in Mississippi (Ridgeland Fine Arts Festival) within the week.  Tommie was home for a few days of his spring break before skipping off to Auburn to spend a few days with his girlfriend.  We had conch fritters using frozen conch from our North Carolina vacation, which is a nice way to remember the trip throughout the year.  I then had to buckle down to complete a few more pieces for the show, because Jim has been whispering in my ear that he’d like me to revisit a few of my most successful pieces for the three new venues I’ll visit in the summer.  And so I did!  I find that I’ve matured as an artist, such that these new iterations are even richer and more dimensional than the originals.  I made the next iteration of my Garden Walk composition, which is one of his favorites, and it forced me to dig deep into my yarn bins.  If you’ve never seen my storage room, you wouldn’t know that all my yarns are sorted by specific color ranges.  I have carmines, earthy reds, dark yellows and sky blues all in separate bins, which were flying off the racks to accumulate all the flower colors for the path.  What’s also fun in assembling the piece is remembering this history of each element in the weaving.  I wove the background in Bloomington, stretched out the weaving in Michigan, needle felted the trunks on the drive home from Kawkawlin on spring break, and crocheted leaf clumps on the way home from Oberlin when I collected Tommie.  The piece is warm and happy because it reflects the life I’m living. 

And yes, Pie.  Jim kept it a secret as to what kind it was as I smelled it baking and waited to test it.  This season of the year is challenging for finding pie fruit as we look forward to the farmer’s market but don’t have any fresh fruits.  He did a sneaky thing, combining a mixed bag of frozen fruit with a box of fresh blackberries to pump it up.  My first bite was of a cherry, which was crazy, and then I hit the blackberries, which were flavorful.  The crust was baked to my definition of perfection, which is a deeply toasted wheat flour taste.  I hope I see more of those!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Is there snow in the forecast?

It’s always hard to know when the last snow of the season falls, except in my art studio.  I decided to celebrate the last snows of the year by completing a piece I’m calling Glistening Snow.  This is another composition sparked by my trip to the Museum of Modern Art in Chicago where I passed through a dense curtain of cascading pearls to enter an exhibit.  I was thinking about the pearls and how striking they look accented with black and red.  I wanted to create a weaving where the snow is gently falling on barren tree branches that look strikingly black against a pale winter sky.  

Adding a pop of red is something I like to do—it just brings some joy and life to a winter landscape.  A bright red cardinal fit perfectly over my snow-pearl background amid the stark black oak branches, and Glistening Snow is complete. 

Of course I rarely focus on just one piece, and I certainly need more color in my life.  I have spring on my mind as it wanders to thinking about spring planting in the garden.  Last year Jim tried very hard to establish a patch of Mexican sunflowers, but the darned deer kept mowing down the tops of the plants when they began to bud.  Optimistically we would think that it would just make a bushier plant, especially if we sprayed with deer repellent.  

In the end, though, the deer won and we just ended up with plant stumps in the ground and very happy deer.  To fill the void I’ve been working on a weaving that will feature Mexican sunflowers and monarchs feeding on them.  I’ve been slowly making the individual flower petals and I finally accumulated enough to assemble the flower heads.  I did the background weaving a couple of months ago, and I’ve even created the leaves with detailed veins.  Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll be able to assemble all the pieces.  Watch this space. 

The other big news is that I finished and shipped my commissioned felted tiles to their forever home, and the owner seems very happy with them.  

I really enjoyed the process of working on the small scale format, and I think that once I have all of the pieces finished for my next two exhibits I will create some individual tiles for the summer fairs.  Those exhibits will be good places to see my recent collections.  One show is local (Migrations:  where have you been and what have you seen) at the Bloomington Playwright’s Project (BPP) going up on March 26^th.  I’ll also be at the Ridgeland Mississippi Fine Arts Festival on April 6 and 7.  I’m hoping there will be some spring flowers on display by then.

I can honestly say I don’t have any pie right now.  I did have a slice of a delightful tart cherry pie for breakfast each day this week, which was wonderful.  This morning I had *sigh* toast.  It was homemade bread that made really nice toast (thanks Jim), but it wasn’t pie.  Between the time I launched this blog and now, a tart lemon pie has appeared, but I think it’s intended for the Second Saturday Soup event tonight rather than just for me.  Maybe there will be some left over and I can have a slice for breakfast tomorrow morning?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Life’s path finds its home.

My past few weeks have been a roller coaster ride through a series of art and family events.  My big commission piece, ‘Life’s Path,’ is now complete and hanging in its new location, the Like Law Group’s reception area.  I just love how it looks against the orange background.  A lot of long hours went into completing the piece, which makes it all the more satisfying to see it hanging on the wall. 

 I immediately launched into my next commission, which also features a path.  This time the focus will be on the trees rather than the path.  Because my patron wants to hang it in a hallway it will have to be a flatter piece.  My trees can be a little feisty, and I don’t want them accosting anyone as they walk down the hall.  The challenge will be rely more on color to help create the perception of depth.  Of course the size of the objects in the piece conveys depth, so I’ll incorporate different sized elements such as crinoids to contribute to the depth aspect.  Fortunately, I have an extensive collection of found objects, sorted by size, so I’m already working the fossils into my piece.  As I’m moving this project forward, I’m also preparing for the next commissioned piece.  This is the time of year when I can catch up on requests for pieces I’ve received through all the summer art fairs, so you’ll be seeing these pieces come together over the next few weeks.  

 Next up is a version of my ‘Some Like it Hot’ piece that featured dozens of peppers.  The layout will be different, with the new piece a being narrower, taller version of the original.  The patron requested that I include some purple peppers, so I stopped in to visit the pepper lady at the Bloomington Farmer’s market on Saturday.  I bought a few purple peppers to get the color right.  A couple of days later I visited Yarns Unlimited and found some Corriedale fleece that was just the perfect match to my peppers.  

Along with the actual artwork, I’ve had several other projects to keep moving forward.  I’ve been creating felted balls in the dryer to use for fruits and vegetables, such as the larger peppers and some lemons that will appear in another piece down the road.  When the weather turned warm and clear, that was my signal to start finishing frames for the pieces.  I need to have the temperature above and the humidity below certain thresholds to stain or paint.  I need to get a bunch of frames painted before the cooler, wetter weather of fall blows in.  

The big family news of the week was the visit of Grandma (Jim’s mom) for the long weekend.  Friday was fall break for the school system and IU, so Grandma stopped by to play with us.  She told us the story of her family having raspberry pie for New Year’s Day with fresh whipped cream when she was a child.  While there are still raspberries around at the farmer’s market, we weren’t there early enough to claim a pie-worthy number.  Luckily, Jim froze a batch for pie filling a few weeks back and he baked one on Sunday morning.  Yum!  We’re going to need to get up early on Saturday and scavenge enough for another wintertime pie.   

Grandma went everywhere we did on the weekend, including out collecting fossils with the family.  Tommie is working on an independent study project for his science class, where he wanted to collect geodes from two locations and compare the crystal structures inside.  Of course it’s just a lot of fun to collect geodes and smash them open, so it doesn’t feel like work.  The report is written and the powerpoint presentation is done, we’re told, with two weeks to spare.  We’ll have to inspect it for grammar and completeness, but I’m delighted that he took the initiative and did it all on his own.   

On the collecting trip, we all climbed down into the river bottoms, including Jim’s mom at (very close to) 80.  She was a trouper, helping to find crinoids and small, opened geodes for Martina as Tommie did his thing.  We fed her a nice fish dinner for her troubles.  In fact, we ate pretty well while she was here!

Last, I wanted to mention a delightful adults-only date I had last Saturday.  Jim and I went to the Uptown for a nice dinner with a bottle of wine.  After the show we walked up Walnut to the Bloomington Playwright’s Project to see "Rx."  The staging was really impressive (great job again, Chad!).  Many of the actors were from Ivy Tech, so I even knew some of them.  The best performer was the woman who played the drug company manager.  She truly brought the character to life.  In fact, I’m sure I met her at a scientific conference several years back when I was still a scientist.  The whole evening was delightful.   

The only bad news from the week was the realization that summer is giving way to fall.  My first show comes up on November 9^th, which is the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild show at the First United Church onThird Street - yup, it's a picture of my piece, Summer Salad in full colour!!  The Déjà vu and Unitarian Universalist Bazaar shows can’t be far behind.  Yikes!  What did happen to summer!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin