Jaan Elken 1957 Still Life With a Green Parrot. 1976

The painting is an examples where a very well-known and acclaimed painter manages to surprise with an early period work that the public has not yet seen. 22-year-old architecture student Jaan Elken has made choices in painting that were amplified in his further work - cool color, fusion of abstract and figurative representation, interweaving of nature with technological and urban feeling. Interestingly, there is a statically painted vagabond parrot in the painting. A different bird appeared in Elken's paintings of the 1980s, a wild seagull, a typical aggressive and vocally dominant inhabitant of Tallinn's cityscape.
The frontispiece of the comprehensive artist album "Jaan Elken" published in 2011 features a reproduction of Wim Lamboo's photo of Jaan Elken holding an old-fashioned slide camera as an attribute, the kind which are no longer remembered today. The artist himself chose the background and as an attribute for the photograph. It points to the powerful 1970s-1980s. to the Estonian slide painting wave of the 1990s, in which Jaan Elken played a central role, and which is somewhat predicted by "Still Life with a Green Parrot".