This was the first time Toor painted a scene so direct and personal. Previously, his work had consisted of larger figurative paintings set in South Asia and created in the style of European Old Masters; expressionistic paintings of sprawling contemporary rooftop parties; and small portraits scattered with speech bubbles and automatic writing in Urdu script. Toor’s art education was in academic painting. He spent years studiously poring over and copying the works of Rococo, Baroque, and Neoclassical-era artists like Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, incorporating their styles into his own original compositions. Over the course of his growing up in Lahore, Pakistan—prior to moving to the United States to earn his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University (2006) and his MFA at Pratt Institute (2009)—he became deeply knowledgeable about the works of modern Pakistani and Indian painters such as Colin David, Bhupen Khakhar, and Amrita Sher-Gil. Much of his early source material also came from Pakistani advertisements. While those earlier works blended his many global aesthetic references, they did not intimately echo his own experience as a queer Brown man living between the United States and South Asia.
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