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The Daily Fandom celebrates National Inspire Your Heart With Art Day! When I think of 2020, not only will I think of it as the year COVID-19 officially made its way to the US, I will also think of it as the precursor to a cultural and spiritual renaissance. During our periods of isolation, as mandated by the government and ourselves, many of us flourished with new artful hobbies and outlets and even mastered and harnessed artistic technique and meta. Some people started projects as actual physical creations, like paintings, textile crafts, works produced by Photoshop, and photography. Others began writing poems that had direct reflections on their lives and the world surrounding us.
While 2021 is and will be a year of hard work for many of us, it is also a year to bounce back to, hopefully, normal programming and diligence. Art can be both industrious and a way to wind down, and with that, we can hope to carry on the creativity into 2021 with absolute fervency. A way to do that is by celebrating National Inspire Your Heart With Art Day and engaging and creating anything that inspires your heart.
Creatively, A Way To Connect
Social media has definitely unified the world creatively. One of the most accessible ways to become inspired by the world and discover new ways to be creative is from social media.
As most of us now know, we are able to “save” inspiration in folders in the private section of our profiles. If, at that moment, we do not have time to practice a particular idea, we can revisit our folders of saved and collected visions for later on. Whether it’s a completely new inspirational item for a fresh hobby or maybe a reprise of older compositions – social media has definitely prompted a cultural revolution that shall inspire many generations to come.
The Sole Subject Of Art
At the beginning of this new year, for a healthy frame of mind and to prompt reflections and better versions of ourselves, meta makes headway. The beginning of doing something creative and or art that inspires your heart can actuate that clarity in our lives that we so deeply need. For example, an artist who conveys this is CC Calloway. Calloway’s specialty is prints and poems as she received her BFA in Printmaking + Book Arts from the University of Georgia and her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.
CC has not only created amazing, new-age works of risograph prints and pieces using original poetry, she has also created works using her personal Snapchats. CC also has plans to turn her Twitter feed and her sketchbook of poetry from 2013 into one epic poem to put into a book. CC’s works depict emotions and belief with messages of connections via philosophy and art history. Even our modern-day social media society can use transformative energies as tools that can be used to enlighten others. CC’s work shows what an amazing time it is to make a comeback by celebrating National Inspire Your Heart With Art Day.
In her artist statement, CC goes into more detail about her pieces and how she hopes to speak to viewers. She also mentions the effect she hopes it has on her critics.
“My practice is centered around poetry, installation, sculpture, printmaking, computer programming, and time-based media. My multimedia installations allow for moments of self-reflection, mirroring the feeling of physical disassociation and social detachment we experience online. Having both a dark sensibility and a subtly humorous sincerity, my kinetic sculptures, print, and time-based installations remove common objects, language, sounds, and symbols (i.e. traffic signs, building material, furniture, commercial prints, and technology) from their traditional contexts. This allows viewers to reconsider the ways these elements affect their emotional landscape, speaking directly to the disconnect between the mind and the body.”
-CC CALLOWAY (( CC Calloway Artist Statement. January 08, 2021. ))
Considering that bit of information, in celebration of TDF’s National Inspire Your Heart With Art Day, a suggestion would be to create a piece for someone else. Create a piece that could possibly speak to them in a way or from a different perspective that they may not necessarily recognize from their day-to-day. Another piece by CC is a risography print that uses a combination of Snapchats turned into a social media collage. It tells not only a story but is able to resonate with many. “Things are real different.” can speak from not just an intuitive frame of thinking for the precedence of COVID-19, but also that life goes through phases, and things will change, whether we notice those changes or not.
Regarding grounds for her written work and meta, CC incorporates a genre that has a fun play on reality
“Much of my practice involves word play, whether it be through original writing or poetic remix of disparate source material. Writing grounds my practice, acting as the source of my ideas, and translating into works of art in both direct and indirect ways. I classify my written work and the art sourced from it within the genre of Autofiction, meaning that the narratives I bring forward in my work are grounded in reality, with subtle elements blurred by fiction or exaggeration.”
-CC CALLOWAY ((CC Calloway Artist Statement. January 08, 2021. ))
To Make And Create Textile Works
Another example of how to celebrate this holiday is through this personal take on art. It is centered around a practice that was popular many years ago: textile work. The reinvention of textile art allows for tradition and innovation to intertwine utility with craft and art. “Textile art is one of the oldest forms of art in human civilization. At its inception, it was not focused on looks but for practical purposes—such as clothing or blankets to keep warm. This dates all the way back to prehistoric times, and anthropologists estimate that this is between 100,000 to 500,000 years ago.” (( Barnes, Sara, Shovava, Today Is Art Day, Comma, and Viviva Colorsheets. “Art History: Ancient Practice of Textile Art and How It Continues to Reinvent Itself.” My Modern Met, September 8, 2020. https://mymodernmet.com/contemporary-textile-art-history/. ))
Different types of textile works, including fabrics and designs, are more than likely continuously drawn from inspiration from around the world and from history as well. “Weaving apparently preceded spinning of yarn; woven fabrics probably originated from basket weaving. Cotton, silk, wool, and flax fibers were used as textile materials in ancient Egypt; cotton was used in India by 3000 BCE, and silk production is mentioned in Chinese chronicles dating to about the same period (( “List of Textiles.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. Accessed January 10, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-textiles-2077437. )). Textiles crafts such as latch and hook, cross-stitch, and needlepoint also became very popular in the 1800s. “Rug hooking in the USA developed along the Eastern Seaboard of North America, from Canada, and along with the northern states of the USA. From the 1830s, the rich could buy machine-made carpets, while the poor recycled yarn and fabric strip into hooked rugs.
We later saw another comeback with this textile-form around the seventies. In the 1970s and 1980s, synthetic yarns and wool/synthetic blends became popular, thus accessibility. In Britain, the best-known latch-hook company was Readicut, as their rug kits were marketed through Shillcraft in North America. (( “Rug Hooking.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Accessed January 21, 2021. )). Traditional hooked rugs are made by pulling yarn or fabric loops through a stiff woven base such as hessian or rug canvas.
The loops are pulled through the backing material with a crochet-type hook set in a wooden or plastic handle. Latch-hooking uses a hinged hook to form a knotted pile from short pieces of yarn or fabric strips. (( Studio, Familiar. “Davion Alston.” Atlanta Contemporary. Accessed January 10, 2021. https://atlantacontemporary.org/people/davion-alston. )). Another form of textile work is latch and hook, which is essentially a form of a textile craft in which you use a latch and hook tool to attach individual pieces of yarn to a canvas, either already painted on or blank. On a personal note, this became the highlight for my creativity for 2021 after I simply browsed through the Hobby Lobby aisles and discovered a Minnie Mouse latch and hook kit. Given plans were put on hold to travel to Disney World; an affordable, attainable, nostalgic item was within reach.
Once you get the hang of it, it’s simple enough to construct a piece or work of composition. It can be time-consuming, as with all other forms and types of handmade textile pieces. What other forms of textile works are easily accessible from your nearest craft store? If you were looking to see what forms of textile techniques are easily accessible at your nearest craft store, the best option would be to looking up some beginner style cross stitch patterns. They can be incredibly liberating to complete.
Lastly, one more form of a textile craft that is more of an intricate and detail-oriented endeavor of needlepoint. It is a great form of art for the perfectionist, and once you have had a bit of practice, you can create pillows, rugs, wall-hangings, even framed art with the needlepoint floss. It’s simple enough but allows you to physically manifest works and pieces without investment in expensive machinery or production.
A Zenith Prediction
No matter the art, meta, craft, I hope to ultimately see a cultural and spiritual revolution blossom from 2020. As nature recycles and re-creates life-sustaining processes, humans are destined to create and celebrate.
This January 31, 2021, as The Daily Fandom celebrates “National Celebrate Your Heart With Art Day,” we hope you enjoy it as much as we do and thus prompts the artistry that can help transform all of us from within. We hope all artists and their statements inspire you. As well, I hope art inspires you to make and do, in celebration of what you believe and how you perceive our world, thus creating a more harmonious space for all of us.