Joy is EVERYWHERE!
In the age of Instagram, joy is influenced all over the place.
www.iloveureka.com is my personal place to influence joy and bring more awareness to the joy that is already all around us. Our beautiful, beautiful home, Eureka Springs, AR, is brimming with what I like to call "aesthetics of joy."
All around this wonderful town, the beauty of the natural environment joyfully surrounds you and when you sprinkle-in the many things created by the residents and visitors - aesthetics of joy are everywhere in Eureka.
And there is joy in finding an aesthetic of joy in Eureka because when you find one, you can say, "Eureka, I have found one!"
In this blog-series, which I call Joy-Spotting, we will explore these aesthetics of joy, understand them and learn more about why we are so drawn to them. Most importantly, we will learn what they do for us.
Aesthetics of joy is a simple, powerful idea: our greatest source of joy is the world around us.
In Eureka Springs, AR - our greatest source of joy is all that is our town. As we explore and understand more about these ten joy descriptors -- energy, abundance, freedom, harmony, play, surprise, transcendence, magic celebration and renewal -- I encourage you, as you journey all around Eureka Springs, to shift your perspective and take a joy-spotting adventure. Get out there and seek out these wonders that make our homes, our connections and our lives very joyful.
In Chapter One pf this series, we will explore the first two aesthetics of joy descriptors - Energy and Abundance.
An emerging body of research shows that there is a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health. Yet nearly all the advice on how to find happiness ignores this fact.
Designer Ingrid Fetell Lee sheds light on the relationship between our environment and our emotions, and share inspiration for living a more joyful life through design.
Let's delve into the art of finding and creating more joy in the world around us.
Joy is high-energy happiness, and the energy aesthetic is the visual manifestation of this energy in our lives: bright color and warm, sunny light. As the German painter Johannes Itten once said, “Color is life; for a world without colors appears to us as dead.”
Chrochet artist, Gina Rose Gallina, lived in Eureka at one time. She left behind a legacy of joy all around town with her exceptional work with yarn and color. Her final product is always infused with her energy and emotion.
Yarnbombing
The trees at Music Park on Main street are covered with Gina's knitting and crotchet all over this little park.
The practice of yarnbombing is believed to have originated in the U.S. with Texas knitters trying to find a creative way to use leftover and unfinished knitting projects, but it has since spread worldwide. Houston artist Bill Davenport was creating and exhibiting crochet-covered objects in Houston in the 1990s, and the Houston Press stated that “Bill Davenport could be called the grand old man of Houston crocheted sculpture.”
Artist Shanon Schollian was knitting stump cozies in 2002 for clear cuts in Oregon. The Knit Knot Tree by the Jafagirls in Yellow Springs, Ohio gained international attention in 2008. The movement moved on from simple ‘cozies’ with the innovation of the ‘stitched story’. The concept has been attributed to Lauren O’Farrell (who creates her street art under the graffiti knitting name Deadly Knitshade), from London, UK, who founded the city’s first graffiti knitting collective Knit the City.
The ‘stitched story concept’ uses handmade amigurumi creatures, characters and items to tell a narrative or show a theme. This was first recorded with the Knit the City collective’s “Web of Woe” installation in August 2009. The Knit the City collective were also the first to use O’Farrell’s term ‘yarnstorming’ to describe their graffiti knitting, as an alternative to the more popular term ‘yarnbombing’. Yarn bombing’s popularity has spread throughout the world. In Oklahoma City the Collected Thread store yarn bombed the Plaza District of the city on 9 September 2011 to celebrate their three-year anniversary as a functioning shop , and in Australia a group called the Twilight Taggers refer to themselves as ‘fibre artists’. Joann Matvichuk of Lethbridge, Alberta founded International Yarnbombing Day, which was first observed on June 11, 2011.
Music park is a joyful sight. Head down Main Street and you can't miss it on the left right before you get to the Eureka Springs train station.
The aesthetic of abundance is the “kid in a candy store” feeling, and it stems from the joy we find in quantity and variety. But abundance doesn’t necessarily have to mean material abundance and the accumulation of stuff. Just as powerful is sensorial abundance, achieved through repeating patterns like polka dots and stripes, the layering of textures, and the use of multicolor palettes. Using these aesthetics can help create a space that reveals the truth of Mae West’s famous maxim: “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”
We can never get too much art. In this artist-town, Eureka Springs has art in abundance. This is a true aesthetic of joy and brings about a tremendous surge of creativity, tourism, revenue, and, of course, joy to our town.
"With a background in found object assemblage, and a former eight-year photojournalist with the Lovely County Citizen in Eureka Springs, it felt quite natural combining both mediums to create my recent works. I have always had a deep fascination with objects. This current series of photographs is my attempt to breathe symbolic life into the inanimate, ad
A Kite Festival is an exceptional example of sensorial abundance. Each year, in Eureka Springs, usually in March, the annual Kite Festival at Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge happens in Eureka Springs, AR.
“Making and flying kites is a ‘green’ sport’ families can share. It’s wind-fueled and gets kids away from sedentary activities like TV viewing and video games,” said Steve Rogers, KaleidoKites co-owner. “It’s a great photo-opportunity with world-class kites worth over a thousand dollars flown during the event. These kites are works of art, which is only fitting for an artist’s community like Eureka Springs,” added Rogers.
The event is one of the refuge’s most popular events each year. Admission is free for kite flying; regular admission prices apply to tour refuge wildlife on display. Proceeds finance rescue and ongoing care for over 135 tigers, lions, cougars and other wildlife that make the sanctuary a life-long home.
Seeing colorful kites in the Eureka skies is sensorial abundance and it brings out the joyful kid in all of us.❤️
Joy-Spotting is a blog-series of three chapters where we seek to discover joy already all around us. Joyspotting is real, it's a thing and there is much joy to spot and experience here in Eureka Springs. In this series. we will take you on a joyful journey around Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
Take a moment to check out the different chapters in this blog-series on www.iloveureka.com