Andrea’s Style of Work

Andrea Naylor currently identifies as a Contemporary Expressionist. She works from an intuitive place with strong influences from Plein aire painting, bold, color, and personal narrative. Her bold use of color, playful distortion, and painterly confidence and energy is a representation of painting from a place of emotional honestly and looseness. Andrea’s expressionist style applied to landscapes is the perfect balance between abstraction and observation. She uses saturated, sometimes unexpected color to create mood and energy. Through simplified shapes, she flattens spaces in landscapes and interiors, and lets pattern and color lead structure. Her works feels reflective, calm, almost lyrical and she works within a contemporary expressionist lineage.

Her work doesn’t fit neatly into a single historical movement (e.g., Impressionist or Cubism), but instead blend several characteristics into a distinctive, modern voice. 

Andrea’s expressive brushwork, highly saturated bold use of color, and figurative scenes prioritizes emotion over realism and often distorts forms or landscapes to express feelings that she paints from memory, intuition, or inner experience.

Some key aspects of her style include:

Expressive and intuitive painting. Andrea paints intuitively from memories and scenes that resonate emotionally, rather than strictly from academic realism, Which aligns her with a contemporary expressionist approach. Her brush work and composition, prioritize feeling and atmosphere over exact representation. 

Bold use of Color and Medium. She works predominantly in bright, heavy, bodied, acrylics, often combined with gouache, oil, pastels, and other media, giving her pieces of vibrant, tactile surface and strong, visual impact. 

Plein Air & Coastal Influence. Her time spent outdoors-especially along the Atlantic coast of Florida, the coast of West Africa, and the coast of Lake Michigan-informs a lot of of her landscapes and seascapes, capturing light and environment in a way that’s reminiscent of Plein air traditions, but with a contemporary sensibility.

Personal and Thematic Evolution.  Naylor recent bodies of work, explores deeply personal themes- such as motherhood, the body, and everyday life- which she interprets through color, form, and symbolic motifs. This narrative quality gives her work, a reflective and often poetic dimension.

Andrea’s contemporary expressionist style emphasizes emotion and subjective experience over photographic realism. While her figurative and landscape elements are expressive, her work often includes recognizable subjects like figures, beaches, flowers, and everyday scenes. Her continuous exploration with different materials includes traditional painting with ceramics, printmaking, and collage, reflecting her interdisciplinary practice. 

Andrea herself describes her art as “Contemporary, Expressionist Fine Art with a strong connection to landscape, personal narrative, and intuitive use of color and media- blending emotional residence with vibrant, modern aesthetics.” 

For Andrea’s “Women in Chairs” Series, this was an intensely emotional body of work to paint- exploring themes of rest and love during a deeply personal period of time following the birth of her third child.