What is Meme Paintings?

Meme Paintings are real-life oil or acrylic paintings of viral internet images, a variant of bootleg memes that recontextualizes reaction images and cartoon stills as gallery-style artworks.

Where did Meme Paintings come from?

The format was popularized by Minnesota artist Dan Lacey, who was commissioned by Google in December 2010 to paint YouTube memes for the walls of the YouTube offices in Tokyo.

What does Meme Paintings mean?

The term refers to the practice of turning digital memes into physical paintings, treating throwaway internet images as subjects worthy of oil-on-canvas portraiture.

How do you use Meme Paintings?

Artists typically pick a well-known meme, paint it in a traditional medium, then share the finished canvas, or a time-lapse of the process, on platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Etsy.

Is Meme Paintings still popular?

The style stayed active through the late 2010s, with Alim Amith's 2017 Instagram series and TikTok painting videos of subjects like Surprised Pikachu and Bold and Brash keeping the format visible.

Meme Paintings

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Published September 6, 2026

Meme Paintings are oil-painted, real-life renditions of viral internet images, kicked off in December 2010 when Google commissioned artist Dan Lacey to paint YouTube memes for the walls of its Tokyo office. The format later spread from gallery-style series like Lauren Kaelin's 'Benjameme' to a wave of Instagram and TikTok painters turning reaction images into gallery-ready canvases.

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Overview

Meme Paintings are a subgenre of bootleg memes in which artists translate viral internet images, reaction shots and cartoon stills into physical oil paintings1. The format ranges from formal gallery-style portraiture, like Dan Lacey's polished renditions of Keyboard Cat and Dramatic Look, to deliberately rough recreations of SpongeBob's 'Bold and Brash' canvas painted for laughs3.

Stylistically, the works trade the flatness of a screenshot for painterly texture, framing and scale, which is often the whole joke: a low-resolution reaction image blown up to canvas size and hung like a Renaissance portrait2. On short-form video platforms, the process itself became the meme, with painters filming time-lapses of themselves rendering figures like Surprised Pikachu or Kirby with a Knife in acrylic and oil3.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

eBay / YouTube (commissioned works)

Creator

Dan Lacey

Date

2010

The first widely covered wave of Meme Paintings came from Minnesota artist Dan Lacey, who began painting YouTube-famous characters and auctioning the canvases on eBay in 20101. In December 2010, Google commissioned Lacey to produce a set of paintings, including Sneezing Baby Panda, Keyboard Cat, Dramatic Look, Rickroll and Maru the Cat, to hang inside the YouTube offices in Tokyo3.

Lacey told Adweek the deal came together after YouTube Tokyo manager Herman Sheremetyev stumbled across his work by typing 'Dramatic Prairie Dog' into Google Instant Search1. The original eBay run of studies for that commission is what put the phrase 'meme paintings' into circulation.

How It Spread

On June 5th, 2013, Mashable profiled Brooklyn artist Lauren Kaelin and her series 'Benjameme,' a set of oil paintings of viral stars named after theorist Walter Benjamin2. Kaelin told Mashable that the Ikea Monkey pushed her into the project and framed the paintings as 'an opportunity to recontextualize these sensations as art objects,' painting subjects like Grumpy Cat and Antoine Dodson2. By April 2019, Etsy listings tagged 'meme painting' had grown past 400 items for sale3.

A parallel strand grew out of the SpongeBob SquarePants episode 'Artist Unknown,' which aired September 21st, 2001 and featured Squidward's canvas 'Bold and Brash.' The prop painting became a recurring target for real-life recreations posted to Instagram3. In February 2017, Afro-Surrealist painter Alim Amith started uploading meme portraits to his Instagram; his February 20th painting of Confused Black Girl passed 3,000 likes within a year, and on August 24th he followed with a Roll Safe edition3.

The trend moved onto TikTok in the late 2010s as painting time-lapses. On March 25th, @maya_1715 posted her own 'Bold and Brash' recreation, @alani_saby shared a Surprised Pikachu painting on April 7th, and @kazuiichii posted a Kirby with a Knife canvas on April 14th3.

How to Use This Meme

The typical Meme Painting takes a widely recognized meme image, a reaction face, a cartoon still or a viral photo, and renders it in a traditional medium like oil or acrylic on canvas. Common conventions include exaggerating the painterly brushwork, mounting the finished piece in an ornate frame, and photographing it in a gallery-like setting so the contrast between high-art presentation and low-brow subject drives the joke.