Robin F. Williams Model Behavior

Seated in Robin F. Williams’s Brooklyn studio, I am surrounded by paintings of women—bathing in water, playing football, vaping, and frolicking on the beach—rendered in her characteristically precise style, full of rich color and innovative textures.

- Megan N. Liberty

Williams’s other subjects have included adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, men positioned in traditionally feminine art historical scenarios, and pussycats. In each of these cases, as with her newest body of work that engages directly with the representation of women in film and advertising, as well as the imagined manifestations of our artificial intelligence devices, Williams’s paintings have a way of winking at the viewer. We see them, but in a way, they see us too, reflecting something uncomfortable about our gaze and our culture.

As she prepared for her upcoming solo exhibition at Various Small Fires, opening in October in Los Angeles, I sat down with Williams to talk about these women and the evolution of her painting from hyperrealism to her new “emojified” figures.

Megan N. Liberty: What’s around us in the studio right now? What are you working on?

Robin F. Williams: I’ve been painting women that I like to think of as zombie nudes. They are reanimations of nudes from art history or pop culture. Swamp Thing is in this vein. She’s meant to be the woman bathing in the background of Luncheon on the Grass. She isn’t really part of the central dialogue of the painting, but I liked the idea of someone seeing her and then doing a double-take, zooming in to notice that she’s actually being pretty lecherous and confrontational. I’ve made a body of work of these women, a number of them smiling, who put offa passive-aggressive, seething anger.

I want to talk more specifically about your faces, particularly the smile you mention and the contradiction between the complacency of these women and the expressions on their faces that suggest something else is really going on.