FullSizeRender Sirron Norris
One of his most iconic characters is his blue bear, which to Norris, represents love in its duality: “Bears can be cute teddy bears or tough grizzly bears.” Similar to the way love can be wonderful or painful. Eventually, he established a specific meaning for each of his cartoon characters, so that when the characters interacted with each other in a painting, “it [could] be read as a sentence” and a story.
Cartoon Literalism allowed Norris to create “a visual language based off of cartoon characters that are familiar to everyone.” For instance, everyone has seen cartoon bears, rabbits, and dogs, so Norris transformed each of these characters into a “distilled-down” visual metaphor that could be used to tell a story and communicate a truth.
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