It's amazing where inspiration comes from.

Yesterday I went to Dia: Beacon, the modern art museum in an up-and-coming (until recently VERY economically depressed) river town about half an hour from where I live. As DH and I toured the site, I was struck by what I think is the single most important message that modern art has to teach us: Art is everywhere, and everything is Art. How else to explain a gallery full of string, piles of rags, video loops of a rat infested studio, giant metal-lined holes and Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes?

A trite but incredibly freeing revelation, at least to me.

Now I'm inspired. I've been contemplating doing a little painting for a couple of years now; something large, oil on canvas, definitely non-representational. But now I know I want to incorporate my fiber arts into that vision, making something of a sculptural painting, a dyed and woven fabric lifting itself off of a canvas, playing with light and shadow and color and texture. I want to start with the raw fleece and process, dye, spin and weave it all myself, keeping bits of each stage -- a snippet of raw fleece here, a hand-carded rolag there -- as I go along (hey, if some Japanese dude can make art out of a series of canvasses with a single date and a newspaper clipping from that date then I don't see anything too far out about my fleece idea).

Lord knows when I'll actually have time to do any of this. I'm just so happy to be this inspired!

And the next time the crap piles up around the house, I'm just going to stick a title on it and call it Art! :)