Welcome to my DEN

Usually, all of my paintings are named after I've finished them. I need to see them, to feel them, and it's only then that the names come. The Rooted Age doesn't seem to work like that. At the moment I have eighteen painting titles written in notebooks and not one finished artefact exists yet. It's the complete opposite of how I've always worked. Hymn For A Drowned Street was called Hymn For A Drowned Street long before I'd even thought about what it might look like.

This week I found myself reading something I'd written on the back of the Den. "If you keep experimenting you will get no actual painting finished."

At this point you may quite reasonably be thinking: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, Carol. The shoes. The giant Den. The tiny paint-covered menace. But... so what?" Fair question. The strange thing is that recognising all of this hasn't suddenly changed what I make. It's changed how I understand what I make. For months I'd been worrying that my work was heading off in lots of random different directions. Every time a new idea appeared I'd find myself thinking, "What the hell has