"Inflatable Love Doll Madonna and Child"

i've started a new painting! Here's the sketch:

And here's the painting in progress:

Now, aside from the obvious, i truly *do* have some other ideas behind this one. i'm not trying to be blithe about the whole blasphemy thing, but it's basically a vehicle to get people thinking beyond the overt. So, here are some of my other thoughts on this painting, in no particular order:

1) Both the blow-up doll and the Virgin Mary are, in the end, perversions of the concept of women for the sake of societal taste.

2) Both the blow-up doll and Virgin Mary are "vessels" for our fantasies, be they intensely pure, or intensely impure.

3) The concept of a woman only being worthy of worship b/c she is an undefiled mother - the miracle of birth minus the whole sex / desire thing. So, clearly that whole "woman-can-only-be-a-virgin-or-a-whore" thing is rumbling under the surface here...

4) Speaking of which: why (for some) must a the object of their desire be mute and pliable in order to be a sex object. Extend this concept to the view of women in, oh, just about anything. Lather, rinse, repeat.

5) In the end, both are extremes of same concept: womanhood and sexuality.

6) In the end, both the blow-up doll and the Virgin Mary give people the wrong idea about women.

7) Bonus: both the blow-up doll and the Virgin Mary have these expressions of pained ecstasy that make my skin crawl. Anyone else?

Obligatory reference to works by artists more famous and more talented than i: "Fatima" by Luke Sullivan, "Virgin Mary" by Chris Ofili, and, of course, all of those paintings of the Virgin from the Renaissance: especially the ones wherein her breast is floating somewhere above her clavical as she breastfeeds (stupid internet is failing me on this one), and where the Baby Jesus is depicted as a tiny man-child. Oh, and that one Mexican Playboy cover. Oh, and these... can't forget these.