Art means what?

When I saw the Take A Word challenge this week I thought it would be easy to do, but it's not proved to be the case.  What does art mean to me....
Without telling you my life story or rambling on for days, all I can tell you is that 'art' in some form or other has been an incredibly important part of my life, always.
There are two major milestones in my artistic endeavours, the first is below:

Acrylic on Canvas - Symbolism

This is a painting I completed in 2003 and marked a change from small almost introverted pieces to large, displayed pieces.  This piece is the largest I have ever done it's 100cm x 78cm and it hangs in my dining room.
The second milestone was when I started this blog and actually shared my art.
I would love to say there is massive meaning behind the piece but in truth, there isn't.  I cant even remember where the idea or ideas came from. This is the first time I didn't use a ruler or masking tape on a painting with my aim being to create something organic and primal.
I can't begin to describe what art is to me, so I will let my piece explain it :)

A Swarm of.... what!

I was looking forward to lots of challenges this week and had lots of ideas, but as the days went by I became so busy at work there was no time for art.  For the  Three Muses Challenge where the subject is animals,  I had wanted to do a painting of a King Penguin, but knew I wouldn't have time this evening, so I went the quirky route and did what else...  a swarm of zebra!

I wonder if a swarm of zebra make the 'bzzzzzz' noise

My aim was for a pictured book style and painted the background in watery acrylic paint and tried to do some layers but hadn't used water colour paper, so the paint layers are not as many as I would have liked to do.

The baby zebra image was found on a wild life site and I printed out 13 of them in different sizes before colouring their white stripes yellow.  The wings are painted in Lumiere Halo Pink Gold,  cut out and glued to the background.  I thought the stamp 'Think and Wonder' from Artistic Outpost was the perfect match and completed the piece by stamping it in Ranger Coffee Archival ink.

It was dark last night when I had finished and I couldn't take photo's which didn't have big shadows on them.  Even at 8 am this morning there are still shadows from my lamp so apologies for the very bad photography.

Steady as he goes

My partner is 'different'.  He likes things that are eclectic and unusual, he also drives like a Nana!  There's nothing better for him than to drive on the motorway at 60 mph, preferably behind a large truck.  For this reason I sometimes call him Captain Slow.
When I decided to create him a sort of a guy style smash book, the cover of the book was born.
The cover is matt board covered in printer paper I treated with water and colour wash spray.  The words "Cpt Slow" are made from chip board letters, embossed with copper powder and stamped with a rubber stampt while still hot.
The other bits on the cover are made from watch parts, copper tape (used to keep snails out of plant pots!) jointing tape (used to fix gaps or holes in plaster board) and muslin sprayed a raisin colour.