imitation, deviation

I finished a painting commission for a birthday present last week. I was given a loose brief that the recipient of the painting loves the african grey parrot (the most intelligent bird in the world), animals in general and has similar (darker) tastes in art music and fiction to my self.

Appart from that I was told to do as I please, thats a dangerous freedom, but one I relished none the less!

I didn’t really imbue the image with any particular meaning until it was well underway, but basically the way I feel about it is this is a creature who doesn’t just imitate language mindlessly it genuinely seems to use it as a communication tool. As artists we imitate nature to communicate visually, and as humans we deviate from nature and make something new, sometimes monstrous sometimes truly sublime but always seeking to leave our stamp.

I guess when I made this picture, in the back of my mind I was thinking I wonder what creatures as intelligent as the African grey think about all of man’s ambitious constructs?

The mechanical parrot on the left is not necessarily a robot but rather a representation of the kind of form and abstraction that takes place when we start to deviate from the pure logic of nature. Sometimes exciting and new, sometimes hideous and just plain wrong, you be the judge.

This is in a similar vein to paintings i’m doing for the upcoming ‘New Wrinkles’ industry launch show, Here’s the development of the piece…