Yarn Donations and Free Speech
Some of the first articles I wrote as Artistic Hope were about yarn bombing, t trend of using art to create a form of street Graffiti. I used to do crochet. I injured my wrist so bad it made activities with my hands painful. I developed some kind of lump that at first freaked me out. I thought it was cancer. But then I did some research and it was just a ganglion cyst. It took over a year, but the cyst finally went away. However it also made my love of hand crafting go away as well. I find myself cleaning house and wanting to find a good home for my crochet supplies.
I want you to understand I still as Artistic Hope love hand crafts and all art forms. I just have come to the realization that some art forms are for me to participate in, and some are for me to just enjoy. I think that we should not lose the skills it takes to hand knit items for use or display. I think that it is important to respect crafts as art. In fact in Los Angeles there is a museum dedicated to crafts called the “Craft Contemporary.” It is currently closed for an installation.
I have been attacked for being Artistic Hope. I came up with this idea. You should not be upset with me for it, but you should find your own. I think just like I have decided that Crochet is not for me anymore, I think maybe who ever “you” are, you should find your own voice. Find your own signature. We live in a country where we claim to be free, yet we have this culture of conformity. I am tired of people telling me to get a therapist because they won’t accept me. For those of you who think I need psychological help and not legal help, have you thought about what you are really trying to say to me- that my dreams as an artist are OVER. That my hope is dead. I am supposed to be happy with getting a job and the typical American Dream and pretend to be happy just so I won’t have to go to therapy for the rest of my life and accept that no one will accept I like acting and I wanted to be a known working actor.
Why do you think I need to give up being an actor? I am not going to be a celebrity because only special people get to do that and we now have royalty in America? Do you know how people get into the Actor’s union? Do you know that there is no requirement of age or sex or race? Do you know you do not have to do Theater to be a film TV Sag Aftra actor? Do you know you do not even have to train to be an actor to manage to get into Sag Aftra and yet I trained and studied? Do you know that I have four Sag Union vouchers that made me eligible to join Sag back in 1995 before I got Breast Cancer?
When I lived in DC I took jobs I did not want to take to survive. I worked for the NRA indirectly. I worked with and for Republicans. It was not until my second year in DC that I finally was able to connect to people who were like me- into the arts. The people I liked being around in DC, were actors who were also lawyers. Or who were lawyers who were also musicians and other things. I am not going to be hanging out with people who are not ARTISTS. I am also not interested really in Directing and love acting.
I do not have friends from the period in my life where I worked against WHO I AM. I do not want to argue and fight. I want to be able to be myself. That is part of being HUMAN. It is psychologically healthy to want to have your own identity. Why is it you can accept that some people are actors, but not ME? Because I have not made money at it? I have not made money as a practicing Lawyer. I have made money as an actor technically, because I spent 5 years working on sets and I hate to tell you this, but extras are actors without LINES. I took my career on sets as a background artist as seriously as I take my career as an ACTOR, which I would have if we really respected free speech.
Art to me is the most important human activity. Why are their cave drawings 44,000 years old? To put this in perspective, Abraham from the Bible is believed to have lived 3000 BC. I am secular and to me Abraham is history or myth or history laced with myth. But here is something many may not know, the oldest jewelry is 100000 years old. However man may have been making art- manipulating his environment to create human expression much longer than that. According to one list of the oldest art, humans may have been crafting as far back as 700,000 years ago.
Why do we now live a society where art is not considered work or employment? Why is it that I have been scorned and bullied for trying to create a business as a writer in the arts? I am not a school teacher or a real estate agent and there are men who are working on sets as actors and production, why is it no one thought I had a plan to do more than be an actor and had to give up acting to be seen as an adult? I think it is because I am a woman.
Artistic Hope is also not a group or an organization. It is me. It is a blog about the arts. People do make money blogging about things that matter to them, like cooking or travel. I have masters in Performing Arts Management. In a world where people claim to be WOKE and want corporations to have less control, why do people assume to have a business you must be a hive or people and not one person standing alone?
To have a lucrative business in the arts, one must have access to artists, and I have spent a decade with people trying to make me be who they want me to be. I have integrity. I am not going to become the person my parents want me to be or a scary abusive narcissistic troll. I like artists. I like actors. I like the people willing to stand out and speak their opinion and be different. I do not see a person with a punk hair due or tats as dangerous unless they demonstrate they are dangerous.
Artists are often labelled crazy by those who do not understand that individual freedom is being true to the self. I do not think that artists who cross lines of sanity should be exemplified. People who do harm to others for their work are criminals and degenerates. Porn and pedophilia and theft are wrong. You are crazy if you think hurting others is art. True art should reflect the best of the human spirit and not cause death or destruction of lives or the planet. Yet being crazy the way I apparently am, is fine to me. Be different if you want, but respect the rights of others to be safe and don’t hurt others. I think we live in a world where to often people label others as crazy who are just different or bold.
When someone crochets or knits they make choices from the pattern they use or the types of knots to the yarn. Each person can take the same supplies and make different final works of art. I am making the choice to give up crochet and give my supplies away. I do not want to waste them. I want to find my crochet hooks a new home with someone who can do some good with them.
I want to focus on writing and creating movies and acting and reading books. I want to grow my mind because using my hands was never really my strong suit. I have been trying to do a little YouTube project called “Cognition” where I talk about the different kinds of intelligence and also talk about how our culture has a way of distorting and misinterpreting facts and meanings. My goal I think is an extension of ARTISTIC HOPE. It is to create a Renaissance. It is not to create a snobbish culture. We can be so much more than one dimensional sound bites of data. I feel like our business constructs and the soundbites that are used to sell us things, leave us intellectually weak. When the greatest minds appear to be behind us and not ahead of us, something needs to change.
I am a woman whose mind needed to be fed and what feeds my mind is exploring human emotions and why people do what they do. Acting is like that for me. It is delving into both the imagination and the human condition. You can not make a realistic character without grounding the imagination into the plausible and real. “Acting” crazy and odd is “acting” and not art if it is not based on believable choices. The physics of acting are as tangible as physics. You push someone down and it just seems like a stunt for effect if there is no reason for the push. For me it is exploring that inner world of actions to reasons that makes my mind connect to life and makes my mind also go in new directions of thought.
I am looking for a home for my yarn, but in the process my mind is dusting cob webs and trying to move past a decade of other people trying to control me and tell me that my life was supposed to be miserable and not fun. That is another sad truth of America right now- we are a culture so driven by the need for everyone to have a job, we have forgotten to let people pursue work that is both enjoyable and healthy mentally and physically. I no longer enjoy crochet. I am letting it go. I never really enjoyed the study of law and I let that go. Years later I am treated like a criminal for wanting to work in the entertainment industry where I was happy and told i have to be a lawyer when that is not something I am good at.
To conclude I am miserable without acting. I stopped doing crochet because I achieved no inner peace from my efforts to create. I do not want to dissuade anyone from crafting or knitting. I just want peace and artistic freedom and also freedom to chose my work and employment.
If anyone has suggestions as to where I should take the yarn in Los Angeles, and I have a large bag of yarn. I also am giving away a yarn bag and crochet books and patterns. I also have a small collection of yarn hooks including hooks for lace.
