Mood

I was looking through photos in my phone gallery, browsing the folder I have reserved for memes and reaction gifs & images, as I do. And then I came across these:

Those aren’t the most popular images of the series; they’re not the ones that’ve migrated to mainstream Facebook memes (as far as I know), and are not the ones I saw first. But I’d been seeing them floating around for a while before I saved them to my phone, and didn’t know where they were from until much later. It’s all the work of Matt Adrian, from the “profusely illustrated” The Mincing Mockingbird: Guide to Troubled Birds book, continued in volumes I, II, and III. His other art, also of even more realistic birds, comes with titles just as narratively creative as the captions he put on these.

These are the ones I remember seeing first, and which are probably the most widely circulated:

All of Adrian’s paintings that I’ve seen — and I’ve never read the actual book, so these are only the images that others have chosen to post online — have a realistic style, though the visible brushstrokes and texture of the canvas underneath give a sense of painterliness. The birds are superimposed with cut-out snippets of text, so that each image looks rather like a collage of found poetry, newspaper fragments pasted on top.

Some of the birds profess a meditative, existential humor, sometimes dread, made poignant by its placement on the fine art of fluffy avians:

Some offer “hope” and humor in a quest for love:

While others hint at the artist’s experience with less than friendly birds:

And some are confrontational, salutational, or both:

There’s an absurdist quality to these, in vein with other contemporary memes. While I’m sure we’ve all had confrontational experiences with birds (the books include bird attack statistics, after all), they don’t usually throw insults quite as direct as these. We don’t expect them to call out our poorly-calculated risks, our inability to keep a clear head, or our trouble at processing our emotions. And the distilled intensity of their reactions — their propensity for winged attacks and a disregard for human convention — serves as caricatures of our own experiences. They’re chaotic, uncouth, unexpected, and relatable.

They can offer hope in inner strength, and in our willingness to fight. And a camaraderie of experiences.

Until next year,

— Lora