Andrew Norris "Queerness"

His paintings showed his confrontation of the way that society accept queerness. He said he didn’t provide a clear solution to achieve utopia, but question the ideal of heroes.

When I saw his presentation, those paintings were so attractive for me, especially the “Cruel” and the “Summer”. He put blue and red flowers’ painting together, and establish a contrast beautiful. 

Except his aesthetic of painting, the back of his paintings and arts are meaningful and understandable. His figurative oil paintings explore how the often-disparaged forms of Americana and heartland kitsch can be recharged as instruments through which to generate and explore queer identities. In his series “Toxic Masculinity”, it is a clear Americana style and he used superheroes’ symbol on them, which is muscles and maybe tight pants. A lot of muscles, that must be the symbol for the Americana superhero style that he wanted to show us. And all the faces are the celebrities’. That also presents the relationship between he and the celebrities. 

I found that all his arts’ color are highly saturated, and have a high contrast, such as blue dress with red hat. Because I don’t know much about his works with celebrities, that cannot give me a lot of sense and I’m a little bit far away from those paintings/arts. But I can feel his strong emotions from his topic/series names and the color in those series. Also, the backgrounds worth to focus on. His paintings are not based on the landscape or the real architecture. His backgrounds seem more abstract, even some are pure color. So, it can lead viewers to focus on the people immediately. That’s the reason why his paintings are attractive to me.