British artist Jason Anderson creates colorful abstract paintings composed of pixelated swatches of pastel-toned oil paint. Up-close, the artist’s paintings look like blocky layers of shapes and color; but, from afar, his scenes—featuring cityscapes, roads, trains, and marinas—are revealed.
Anderson began his career as a stained glass apprentice, where he worked on restoring the windows of cathedrals. He soon progressed onto designing the glass murals himself, where he learned how to break down subject matter into “jigsaws” of colored sections. This approach still shines through in his paintings today—complex scenes are brought to life with simple shapes and careful consideration to hue and tone.
im fucking dying what the hell kind of noxious fart gas do u have to have instead of brains to fucking comment something like that 😂
im just i dont even know where to begin, between the foolishness of forgetting that queer people predate the she-ra reboot and the blatant disinterest in hearing the experiences of queer people in different contexts and the fact that maybe just maybe we dont exclusively want to watch Certified Gay media and that queer reading is a way of actively engaging in the art u consume and validating urself and etc etc… im dying, what a mook 😂
It must be so strange for kids now to wrap their head around how little representation there was back in the day. And what we did get was generally bad - if you were any kind of queer character, you were either murdered or a murderer who deserved to die. No in between. It really did a number on generations of queer people, seeing ourselves presented that way.
If you want to talk animated queer characters, up into the Disney Renaissance and beyond, the only queer-coded characters you ever saw were the villains. Hell, in the Beauty and the Beast reboot, they gave us “a confirmed gay character” who was apparently LeFou, Gaston’s side-kick. I say apparently, because have you watched the film?
I can only think of one mainstream film I saw from the 80s that had any positive queer representation
while studying film at uni
and it was tangled up in a savage critique of racism, culturalism and Thatcher’s Britain.
Things are better now, yes, but let’s not forget where they started. Let’s not forget how far we’ve come and how far we still need to go.
ellen is garbage, but when she came out on her TV show (april 30th, 1997. i was fifteen.) it was national news. for months.
a year and a half later, matthew shepard was beaten, tortured and left to die, because he was gay. his death was also national news - but more importantly, his murder is what led to gay bashing being legally declared a hate crime. i was sixteen years old and had been with my then-girlfriend for almost a year. assaulting, raping, and killing us for being queer wouldn’t have been prosecuted as a hate crime.
i could go on for so, so long but this is already pushing me close to tears.
“you could be watching she-ra” my god. you know, i did watch she-ra when i was a kid.
i didn’t see myself in any of them.
I am 43 years old. The first time I remember seeing a lesbian couple kiss on television that wasn’t porn or immediately leading into deaths meant to demonstrate that lesbianism would immediately destroy your lives (within the next 90 minutes!) was The Body, a Buffy episode which aired on February 27, 2001.
I was 24. My daughter was an infant. I’d never seen anything like it before. Here I was! There! On screen. I identified with dorky, awkward, very gay Tara so much.
And then you know what happened just over a year after we finally saw Willow and Tara kiss, having been denied for seasons because the network wouldn’t let them?
Whedon fucking killed Tara off in the most ridiculous, pointless way possible, right after Tara and Willow, who had broken up, got back together.
My “good, meaningful, actually changed my fucking life” representation still followed the horrible tropes. That’s how hungry we were. That’s how desperate we were. We still pointed back to Willow & Tara as ‘this is the best we’ve gotten,’ even though she literally got shot through the heart, somehow, randomly, with a stray bullet the morning after she and her girlfriend have make-up sex and get back together.
Fuck.
I think this is very indicative of a cultural divide between even mid-millennials and gen z. I graduated high school in 2007. My middle and high school years were filled with people drawing explicit, realistic images of me, nude, with a penis. People writing slurs on my sidewalk with bleach, and when my family cleaned it before I saw it, they came back and wrote it with bleach in the grass, killing the grass and leaving me to see a slur every day when I walked outside, all because I had cut my hair short and I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs. I didn’t even know I was into women at the time.
And one of the boys who led the most vicious attacks on me came out as gay in 2006. He was met with support from a lot of the students who had treated me like a blight on the world because they assumed I was a lesbian. The only LGBT person I’d seen in film was Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs. Real great representation. I was afraid to watch Xena because if anyone from my school found out, I’d be beaten to hell in the locker room - like I already was, on accusations of staring at their boobs.
And a few years later, after tireless work by a lot of very exhausted people and cringey PSAs like Hillary Duff’s “when you call something gay, do you realize what you say” campaign, queerphobia began to be seen as the bigotry it always was. A few years ago, my niece came out and started dating a girl at her high school, and I cannot tell you the terror that filled me for her safety. She, blessedly, lives in a very different world than I did when I was her age.
So when people scoff at barely-there representation, or representation that existed entirely within the minds of the people watching the movie, and when people laugh at the idea of now-antiquated slurs like “fruit” and “poofer”, to me that is partly a victory. It is a comfort to know that people younger than me have a more accepting world than it was 15, 20, 30 years ago.
But it is also deeply insulting that people who never faced what others did, will pass condemnation on those others for accepting scraps and crumbs. It’s like eating three meals a day and laughing at Depression era soup recipes of ketchup and water. “Or you could just buy some Campbell’s or something with any nutritional content, smh”
The same people that bitched about Love, Simon and it’s ‘relevance’ for today’s audience are the same ones telling us to get over it and watch she-ra
i was born in late 96 and sometimes that makes me a gen z, sometimes a millennial. I’m kind of shocked that people younger than me can just… not realize this. it’s so weird. in a way it means things have gotten much better. but it’s depressing how quickly people forget, as a whole, how hard it was to make things better.
