Felix Cartagena
The Renaissance Bubble Wright

by Gael Stirler

Felix Cartagena's "Fairy Spheres" are mystifying and beautiful as they float on the breeze, capturing light on a fragile film, glistening with all the colors of the rainbow.

"I see bubble making as performance art, but as one step removed. It is not the making of the bubbles but the bubbles themselves that is the performance." says Cartagena' who loves watching bubbles and watching how people react to bubbles. "It is unspoken harmony with the universe."

Felix Cartagena with his Fairy Sphere Wagon
at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire, 2005

Bubbles in History
Soap bubbles occur naturally whenever water, air, and soap interact. At any given moment four percent of the earth's oceans are covered with bubbles, which play a vital role in the chemistry of life. From early times this phenomenon has intrigued children and adults. Archimedes was the first to record that the angle of the planes created when two or more bubbles connect is always 120°. Pieter Bruegel included a child blowing bubbles in the left hand corner of his painting Children's Games in 1560. Jean-Etienne Liotard, painted Children Blowing Bubbles in the early seventeenth century.

Detail from Children's Games by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1560, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna.

Cartegena is one of a handful of professional bubble artists like Professor Bubbles and Sterling Johnson, the Bubblesmith, who are performing around the country. He has invented a number of "ephemeral sculpture machines," as he calls them, including one that creates bubbles 3 feet wide and 12 feet long. Like a modern da Vinci, he designed and created a renaissance-style deus ex machina to make dancing Fairy Spheres for the children at the Renaissance Faires.

Look for Felix Cartagena at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire, and the Maryland Renaissance Festival just outside of Annapolis, Maryland this fall. Visit his Bubble website at www.bubblesbubbles.com

Felix Cartagena's favorite
bubble picture

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