Lake

I haven't post for 2 weeks, and I didn't 'paint' for half of that as I was moving to my new house in Nottingham but once I got organised, I restarted. There isn't much difference in the amount of paint on the canvas, partly for the reason above, but also because I'm slowly building outwards now. Every day when I finish painting, I have a look and think of some new way to paint it or see it looking a lot differently, but I think this is a good thing. By doing it so slowly it gives me the opportunity to develop the ideas in my head that you might normally have developed before starting the painting. I like this idea, because there can't really be any mistakes in what I do on the painting, and if something doesn't look right, I can just cover it. I read recently that artists like Damien Hirst work in that way, but I don't know whether that's true or not, maybe some of his work has been.

Sloth

In The Times on Wednesday there was a column by Grayson Perry, the Turner prize winner 2 years ago, about how the increasing speed of culture is getting in the way of creating good art. He says "we are prone to being sucked into the idea that fast is somehow central to modernity. To be relevant is to be broadband-quick and dressed for next season. Apparently artists also need to become museum-supply companies with a high turnover of works if they want to succeed internationally." He's decided to start the 'Slow Art Movement' to counter this rise in speed, something that seems very relevant with this piece! Read more about it here.
I started this project in effect when I bought this canvas from the works over a year ago now, and I started painting it about 2 months ago. I recently decided buying a canvas from the works, while being cheap, is not clever, and so am currently hatching a plan to get around this and improving the painting - how exciting!

Madonna

The center part seems to resember an icecream cone, or a microphone. It might still look like a birdman too, but perhaps a heavily pregnant one, in which case it would have to be a birdwoman. Either way, it's a bit silly as there is no such such as either a birdman or a birdwoman, although there are birds, men, women, manbirds and woman birds and men and women who dress up as birds for a living or possibly just for halloween.