Mary had a little lamb, she also had a bear...

So the bear images began to develop. I started by using reference from images found online. These reference images were physically cut and stuck to begin with, before I realised that using my artistic license could work just as effectively. These initial experiments with paint, colour and style were fairly small scale (A5-A4 size) and focussed on achieving a workable identikit effect, mixing the teddy features to create the best effect. They also served to experiment with paint use to re-create the fluffy qualities of the bears. I was keen to utilise a fairly loose approach to the painting, as traditionally my style has always been quite tight and precise. Again the idea being to stretch me artistically and take my work in new and unfamiliar directions. At the same time as doing all this paint and compositional experimentation, I remembered the work of the Chapman Brothers which I had seen a couple of years ago at the Tate Britain as part of the Turner Prize. One of their pieces had caused a rather exciting uproar, as they had quite cheekily defaced a series of important etchings by the Spanish artist Goya. I remember thinking these were great at the time because they injected such humour into these fairly stiff images of war and death by goya. I enjoyed the playfulness with which they were poking a bit of fun at the po-faced-ness of the art establishment, paying thousands of pounds for the Goya prints, only to paint clown faces all over them. Taking this on board I started to experiment with overworking photographic imagery, going back to my original intentions to work with photographic material.