Ants and the Arts!

My first blog line is starting to sound repetitive, but my art focus has been on the next commission piece in the queue.  This refrain will be continued over the next couple of months as I work toward completing my next four commissions...

This week I’ve been making more cute vegetables.  The carrots are done and await installment onto the weaving.  The celery stalks are next, made by needle felting the needed shapes from raw wool that I washed and carded this summer.  I need both center cut stalks and pieces closer to the white root section – the ones that are shaped like a paddle.  I now have three of the five naked celery stalks for the piece made, and when I get all of the forms made I will clothe them in celery-green-dyed wool.  And then I’ll be on to tomato completion.  I resumed tomato poking again to create the meaty part of the sliced fruit, which requires a slightly different shade of red from the juicy part.  

 I’ll finalize the slices by creating the seeds from wool that I dyed with the bark of maple trees from Grandma’s house in Michigan.  When that’s done I’ll have five of the ten vegetable piles and I’ll be off on the trail of broccoli florets.  This commission was promised for the middle of December and I’m feeling good about meeting the deadline.  I’m hoping to find just a little window of some warm weather soon to do some more dyeing, though.  I have a couple of large, forest-based commissions pending that I’ll need more of my green mohair boucle to make leaf clumps.  Then I can just huddle down in my art studio and try to weave and stay warm until winter passes and I don’t need to imagine spring greens. 

I did have some measure of closure on a project for my boys and me.  The final “Phantom” performance was Saturday night.  Sunday was tear down morning.  A whole bunch of cast family member volunteers showed up to reduce the set to a nicely organized pile of lumber for the next performance.   

The costumes and materials have been packaged for future performances (go costume clean up crew!), and some key prop pieces borrowed from Cardinal Stage Co  made their way back home.  All in all, it was an exuberant bunch of musical theatre art supporters and I was impressed at how quickly it all went away. 

I did spend some time this week getting ready for the upcoming holiday season.  I assembled a bunch of five packs of note cards, packaging them with ribbons for delivery to local art galleries.   

I’ll bring some along to the upcoming Artisan Guild Show at the Convention Center where I’ll feature my Re-Shirts and weavings.  Of course my ‘Looking at Water’ exhibit will still be up in the adjacent Rogers room, so my framed pieces be well represented.  I did also hold a pop-up exhibition at the Spring Hill Suites downtown.  Ashley organized an evening show for a couple of local artists.  She and the hotel staff did an outstanding job bringing it all together.  There were wonderful champagne aperitifs and beautiful catering—the food was good but the crab cakes were delicious.  

 It was really nice to hang out and chat with both people who came specifically for the show and some hotel-goers who stopped by to see the art. 

Finally, on the horizon is the Opening Reception for the Big-Headed ant exhibit atWonderlab.  Come and join us this Friday (Nov 7, 2014) from 5 - 8:30 pm for art, ants and activities.  Both children and adults are welcome to create their own miniature Big-Headed ants by felting balls of merino noils (thanks, Sheep Street!) for the head and abdomen and using brown pipe cleaner for the appendages.   

Erin from Wonderlab and I made the prototype, and we had a lot of fun doing it.  I’ll be there, hanging around in case anyone wants to talk about ants.  If not, I’ll be poking at vegetables.  I’ll bring all my little veggie piles for people to see.  And speaking of cranberries, Jim made me another cranberry apple pie!  This time he used a whole bag of fresh cranberries.  It had a delightful tart flavor and I’m looking forward to a week of espresso and pie breakfasts.  That, and some leftover Halloween candy should keep me zinging and creating more art!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin 

Celery stalks, strawberry shortcake and big walleyes

I spent a delightful week in Michigan with my family. The weather was cool, even cold at times, but we had a great visit. We brought some fresh blueberries and Jim made us a pie. Luckily, we also found some just-ripe Michigan strawberries. Add some fresh-baked biscuits to the week and we had two fine shortcake desserts—yum! But my biggest success was—wait for it—on the waters of Saginaw Bay fishing for walleyes. We took out the Lila Mae, my late father-in-law’s boat, on a trip to look for walleyes. Over Jim’s pooh-poohing I picked out a red and silver lure with a spider on it at Frank’s, announced that it was the perfect lure for the day, and proceeded to catch a huge 24.5 inch (62 cm) walleye on it. It was the only fish of the day, and boy, I reveled in that victory. Jim turned it into a tasty fish fry, supplemented with Grandma’s homemade coleslaw. Everyone feasted!

All week long we generally just spent a lot of time doing things we don’t normally do at home. We all played mini-golf (and Jacob beat everyone), the boys did a lot of archery in the back yard, and we did a little shoe shopping between feasting. It was just a great vacation all around.

I may have been on vacation, but don’t think for a moment that I didn’t spend some quality time creating art. During conversations and quiet times I did a lot of poking. I was focused on making small vegetables for a piece I’m doing called Summer Salad. I finished off the tops of some radishes, carrots and broccoli and I created my first celery stalks. The stalks tend to have a thick center rib and are thinner on the outer edges of the curved arms. The progression of stalk creation was interesting to watch. I laid out the fleece as a unit that was three times as long and wide as the final stalk. After I started poking I eventually shaped it down to the size I wanted and I’m pleased with how it turned out. I also made a few dandelion flowers for a different piece – those still need a haircut to transform them into well coiffed lawn flowers. The pressure is on to get some art pieces completed in the run up to the Art Fair on the Square in Madison, Wisconsin. Sadly, I wasn’t able to participate in the show of the same name in Bloomington Saturday due to booth and art damage from the Columbus show. I’ve heard that it was fabulous – congrats BPP on transforming it to a well attended show – and look for me next year! And fortunately, the replacement booth frame pieces I ordered arrived in the mail while we were in Michigan. Hopefully by the end of this week I should have a workable booth.

I do have a few other newsy things to tell you about… First, I’m the facilitator for a community weaving project out at McCormick’s Creek State Park this Saturday. I’ll be warping my five foot loom and organizing all sorts of natural materials to use in the project - all in organic, earthy colors. When I do a project you never know what materials will end up in it—this time I’m including some rope I got from Grandpa’s barn while we were in Michigan. I’m also gearing up to do some dyeing this week, or at least getting ready to dye. My photographer, friend and frame maker Tom Bertolacini brought me some Osage orange wood chips. He said that he had heard about dyeing with them and wondered if I was interested. What? Something to experiment with? Sign me up! That got me reading about Osage orange dyeing, which led me to dyeing with bark. Grandma had a lot of trees come down during the windy spring. Normally these get chopped up and burned, but there was quite a backlog of materials. I picked up a couple of bags of maple and oak bark to experiment with. These even have some bonus lichens on them, which is supposed to enhance the colors. I’ll soon set up some soak pails and see what I extract from the bark. I’m hoping to dye some Merino wool for natural color scarves this fall season. Time to get busy again!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin