Disaster Girl
Oil on canvas · 40 × 40 cm · 2024
This one joins my Memes series — internet memes reimagined in oil.
Disaster Girl is the 2005 photo of a young girl smirking in front of a burning house, endlessly recaptioned to place her calmly watching over one disaster or another — one of the internet’s most recognizable memes.
I painted this one mainly as an exercise in older oil techniques I hadn’t tried before — hair, skin tones, and smoke each behave very differently on canvas, and I wanted to get a feel for all three at once. The eyes gave me more trouble than I expected, and I can already see where I’d do them differently now. But I’m genuinely happy with the skin: building it up through several thin, semi-transparent layers, the way older paintings often were made, gives it a subtle shimmer that a single opaque layer just can’t produce. Still plenty to learn, but this one taught me a lot.