Ocean Dropout: The Fish That Left the Sea, and the Omega 3 Pill That Looks Guilty

Ocean Dropout is a mackerel that has left the sea and is sitting on a strawberry ice cream. It is a bright, sweet, slightly wrong picture, and it is probably the most autobiographical thing I have painted.

I talked about it in art therapy today, which is where a few of these threads finally connected for me. So here is the full reading, including the part I did not consciously plan.

Dropout means the one who leaves

A dropout is somebody who steps out of the thing everyone else is staying in. School, a career, a scene, a life plan that looked fine on paper.

My fish is exactly that. It has climbed out of the ocean, which is the only environment it is built for, the water full of other fish who are technically its own kind. It left anyway. Not because the ocean was cruel, but because being surrounded by people who are supposedly just like you and still feeling like the odd one out is its own specific kind of lonely.

So it goes somewhere it does not belong at all

And where does it go? Onto a strawberry ice cream. On land. In the sun. On top of something that is melting, sugary, and about as hostile to a fish as an environment can get.

That is the joke and the sadness in one image. When the place you are supposed to fit never felt right, the alternative is not automatically a better fit. It is just a different kind of wrong, and at least this one is your own choice. The fish is not thriving on that ice cream. It is out, though. It picked the absurd option over the one that quietly wore it down.

Why this is a self portrait with fins

I am autistic and I have ADHD, and this is the picture I would hand somebody instead of explaining what that feels like socially. Not a dramatic exclusion, nothing cinematic. Just the constant low level sense of being in the right species and the wrong shape, of doing the same thing as everyone in the room and still doing it visibly differently.

Every group I have ever been in has had a version of that moment. Same water, same fish, and me quietly checking the surface for an exit.

I have written about the wider version of this in Being a Neurodivergent Artist: Living Between Categories and Being an Autistic and ADHD Artist, and about what it does to the way my work looks in My Art Is Neurodivergent and What Is AuDHD Art?

I did the same thing, only with more Furbies

Here is the part I only worked out afterwards. I did not just leave the water. I built myself an ice cream to sit on.

I choose my surroundings extremely carefully. Not in a design magazine way, in a survival way. My living room has an entire shelf of 90s toys and collector magazines: Game Boys, action figures, Furbies, sticker albums. In front of a huge mirror there is a whole gym worth of equipment, wall bars, a pole, dumbbells, a weight bench and even a horizontal bar. There are colourful guitars and ukuleles standing around everywhere, and the walls are covered in odd, funny art.

As a room concept it makes no sense whatsoever. A squat rack does not belong next to a Furby, and neither of them belongs under a wall of strange paintings. It is exactly as absurd as a mackerel sitting on a dessert, and it is the most comfortable place I have ever been in.

That is the second half of being a dropout, and it is the part nobody tells you. Leaving is not the achievement. Building the ridiculous place you are going to sit in, out of the specific things that make you feel like a person, is the achievement. I gave the whole flat a tour in The Candy Decay Apartment, and the reason half of it is from 1997 is in Why 90s and Y2K Nostalgia Shows Up in All My Art.

The Omega 3 pill in the corner

Then there is the pill. A small capsule with Omega 3 written on it, sitting there in the picture like it wandered in by accident.

It is the most morbid thing in the whole painting and it looks like a health supplement. Omega 3 capsules are made of fish. The essence of the fish, pressed into a golden bead that people swallow to feel better, right next to a living fish who is having a day. Something gets rendered down into a wellness product, and nobody thinks about it while they take it with breakfast.

And the pill knows. I painted it with an expression, and that expression is guilt. It sits at the edge of the composition looking like it is hoping very hard that nobody notices what it is, or where it came from, or who it used to be.

That contrast is my favourite thing in the picture. Cute little capsule, cheerful colours, quiet cannibalism. Sweet on the outside, unpleasant all the way down, which is the entire principle behind Candy Decay.

Sweetness, dread and a melting dessert

The ice cream is doing work too. It is pink, it is delicious, and it is dissolving under the fish while we watch. Nothing in this painting is stable. The sea got left behind, the dessert is going, the pill is trying not to be looked at.

That is the same machinery as skulls hidden in fruit, which is centuries old and which I unpacked in Memento Mori and Vanitas Art. If you want the theory of why a picture can be adorable and grim at the same time without breaking, that is in What Is Cute Creepy Art?

Here is the original from the side, painted by hand on a wooden panel and sealed with a thin layer of resin, which is why the ice cream genuinely looks wet in real life. How that is built up layer by layer is in How Candy Decay Art Is Made.

Why I keep painting the outsider version of things

Because a fish on an ice cream is easier to look at than a sentence about not fitting in, and it says more. Surreal animal art works like that: you put the feeling into a creature, the creature does something impossible, and people recognise the feeling immediately without anyone having to be brave about it. More of my animals do this in Surreal Animal Art.

Ocean Dropout is the one I would keep if I could only keep one, because it is not a sad painting. The fish left. It is sitting in the sun on a dessert, which is ridiculous, and it is not going back.

Take the dropout home

Ocean Dropout is available as a hand-signed art print for 35 euro, signed by hand, and it looks very good in a room belonging to somebody who has also considered climbing out of the water. There is only one original, and the rest of the sweet and slightly wrong crowd lives in the hand-signed print collection.