I'm Perfect, But Unreal

Acrylic gouache on paper.

20x27x1"

These birds are painted in gouache against absolute black — isolated, luminous, suspended.
They come from a memory I've carried since childhood: lying on my grandmother's sofa in Brazil on a Sunday afternoon, watching hummingbirds hover outside the window. Ten seconds, maybe thirty, of pure suspended beauty — before someone called from another room and the moment dissolved.
The black background removes everything that doesn't matter. It insists the eye rest only on what is most precious. These Brazilian tropical birds exist against nothing else — no landscape, no distraction. Darkness as selective memory: protective, preserving.
One of these birds is not real. I'm Perfect, But Unreal is painted from an image I took for a photograph of a living species — until I realized it had been generated by AI. I painted it anyway. It belongs here completely: a perfect bird that never existed, resting among birds I remember. That is how memory works — we don't only keep what is precious, we invent it, edit it, and choose what to believe we saw. The painting is real. The bird never was.