These Women Portraits Demand Your Attention

Robin F. Williams’ women portraits might catch you off guard. Bold, striking, and unapologetic, her imagined women (part mythical, part caricatures) are painted with exaggerated body parts and a somewhat wicked glance.

ā€œIā€™m most concerned with creating power dynamics between the painting and the viewer,ā€ Williams admitted in an interview with Art of Choice. ā€œI work to give every figure a kind of sentience or self-awareness. To be more specific, the paintings explore gender in an American context as it relates to power. I work to balance narrative with formal concerns in order to simulate these dynamics. Iā€™m always trying to keep myself curious and engaged with paint as well. This results in a lot of play and some humor in my practice.ā€

But though humoristic, her art isn’t meant to be taken lightly. Based in Brooklyn, Williams received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has since exhibited her work at galleries like Bard College and Sargentā€™s Daughters. She’s also amassed an impressive following online, with more than 85k fans on Instagram alone.

For most of her practice, she admits to working exclusively in oil and employed varying degrees of realism. But in the last several years she’s been slowly incorporating other techniques and mediums. ā€œI mix those treatments with more painterly passages and the result is a kind of mash up of different eras and visual signifiers,ā€ says Williams.

You’d want to take a closer look:

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