Paranoid Parrot
Oil on canvas · 40 × 40 cm · 2024
This painting joins my Memes series — internet memes reimagined in oil.
Paranoid Parrot is the go-to reaction image for that special 3 a.m. thought spiral: a coworker says “sounds good” instead of “sounds great,” and within four seconds you’ve reconstructed an entire conspiracy against you.
What I’m genuinely proud of here is the beak, built up the traditional way: fat over lean, each layer a touch oilier than the last, so the paint stays flexible instead of cracking apart.
Why bother? It lets you stack many translucent glazes on top of each other — and in the finished painting, light doesn’t just bounce off the surface. It travels down through that stack of polymerized oil, striking pigment particles at every depth: some of it gets absorbed, some gets reflected back out, and because this is happening across so many layers at once, the whole surface shimmers in a way no photograph quite manages to capture. The catch: each layer must “dry” completely before the next goes on, or the paint turns to mud, ruining the whole thing.