explore | Grilled Cheese

@patrickkapty.bsky.social Oct 15, 2026, 7:19 PM

#art #popart #floral #design #PeterMax #BigRedFlowers #c2009 #americanart #americanartist

@mdstamper.bsky.social Oct 13, 2026, 5:12 PM

“Swoon at the Water Pump” by Robin F. Williams (American) – Oil on canvas / 2010 – Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, Ohio) #WomenInArt #RobinFWilliams #RobinWilliams #ColumbusMuseumofArt #art #artText #arte #AmericanArtist #Surrealism #ContemporaryArt #artwork #AmericanArt #2010sArt #SurrealArt

A young woman lies stretched across a blue-green mound of grass beneath a pale, unsettled sky. Her body seems both collapsed and theatrically posed: one arm reaches toward us, the other rests against her chest, while her bare legs extend beside an overturned metal bucket. Behind her rises an old hand pump. Most startling is her dress. Its blue outer shape opens into a pink-red interior of looping, tubular forms—part fabric, part flower, part exposed anatomy. The image is beautiful, comic, vulnerable, and faintly alarming all at once.

American artist Robin F. Williams painted “Swoon at the Water Pump” early in a career devoted to unsettling familiar ways of looking at bodies. Williams’s first solo exhibition, “Rescue Party,” presented this painting in 2011 and described a surreal world of adolescents suspended at moments of discovery or change. Here the figure also recalls a long tradition of the swooning woman so a limp wrist, reclining body, exposed throat, flowing dress, and pastoral setting echo older images in which feminine weakness became spectacle. Williams makes those ingredients strange. The woman sprawls across the landscape, enlarged and foreshortened, with undeniable physical presence.

A water pump and bucket suggest manual labor within a rural setting, yet nothing is functioning as expected. The bucket has fallen. The woman is down. Her extravagant dress seems to have burst open into a glowing world of flowers. Williams’s smooth modeling and eerie color make the scene feel hallucinatory. Bristling grass surrounds the body, yellow flowers dot the ground, and the sky glows with artificial calm like a stage backdrop.

This early-career painting shows the artist questioning gendered expectations. Did the woman “swoon” exhausted, ecstatic, injured, performing, or simply refusing to stand? Williams withholds the answer. What remains is the tension between vulnerability and command of a woman apparently overcome, yet visually dominating the scene.

@mdstamper.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 4:33 PM

“Summer” by Thomas Wilmer Dewing (American) - Oil on canvas / 1890 - Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut) #WomenInArt #YaleUniversityArtGallery #Tonalism #AmericanArt #art #artText #yale #1890sArt #ThomasDewing #ThomasWilmerDewing #summer #arte #AmericanArtist #YaleUniversity

Four young women move hand in hand across a dark green landscape while a fifth, dressed in vivid red, sits at the right playing a harp. Their long evening gowns of muted gold, rose, brown, pink, and red form a sequence of color against a shadowed ground. Dewing elongates their bodies and simplifies their faces, so the women are less individual portraits than a measured procession. Slender birch trunks rise behind them in pale verticals, echoing the women’s upright forms, while their linked arms create a gentle horizontal rhythm that carries the eye across the canvas.

Painted in Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1890, “Summer” belongs to the dreamy, atmospheric mode for which American artist Thomas Wilmer Dewing became known. Yale notes his interest in James McNeill Whistler, Asian design, and music, all of which help explain the painting’s unusual stillness and sense of arrangement. The women’s movement has often been described not as an energetic dance, but a controlled sequence of poses. The harp reinforces the musical structure of the composition, suggesting that Dewing was thinking about harmony not only as sound, but as an organizing principle for color, line, and spacing.

The scene is idealized, but its women are not simply decorative accessories to the landscape. Their linked bodies command the center of the picture, and their coordinated movement gives them a collective presence. At the same time, Dewing withholds narrative clues like who they are, where they are going, or what relation binds them. That ambiguity allows the painting to hover between social scene, allegory, and dream. In the rapidly industrializing America of the late 19th century, such a cultivated, suspended world would have felt deliberately removed from modern urban life.

“Summer” ultimately depends less on story than on the tension between motion and stillness with women moving through a landscape that seems almost motionless while their bodies turn music into a line.

@patrickkapty.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 5:35 PM

Liberty and Justice for All
hand painted lithograph
c. 2006
Peter Max (1937-2026)
USA

#handmade #lithograph #handpainted #statueofliberty #nyc #libertyandjusticeforall #PeterMax #artist #artwork #art #postmodern #popart #political #patriotism #c2006 #AmericanArt #AmericanArtist #911relief #charity

@mdstamper.bsky.social Oct 6, 2026, 4:41 AM

“Escape to Nowhere” by Pat Trivigno (American) - Oil on masonite / 1946 - Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans, Louisiana) #WomenInArt #PatTrivigno #PasqualeTrivigno #AmericanArt #AmericanArtist #ModernArt #AmericanModernism #Trivigno #Expressionism #OgdenMuseum #OilPainting #art #artText #arte

$Painted in 1946, “Escape to Nowhere” belongs to a pivotal moment in Pat Trivigno’s life. Born Pasquale Trivigno in New York City in 1922 to Italian immigrant parents, he earned his M.A. from Columbia University that same year and soon moved to New Orleans, joining the art faculty at Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1947. He would teach there for more than four decades and become an important influence on generations of artists. Tulane describes his work as combining disciplined structure and brilliant color with influences ranging from Cubism and Mexican art to Surrealism and emerging abstraction. In this oil painting, an elongated figure rushes across a fiery field of orange, rust, red, and gold. The female body twists upward while one long leg thrusts dramatically to the right, giving her the momentum of running, leaping, or desperately fleeing. Her torso is fragmented into jagged planes of turquoise, blue, green, cream, and black that seem to break apart as she moves. Both arms rise above her head, with long angular hands overlapping. Her head tilts backward, partly concealed by the hands, intensifying a sense of strain or alarm. On either side of the woman, clusters of much smaller pale figures also appear to hurry through the landscape. Rough brushwork, scraped lines, and overlapping patches of pigment make the entire surface feel unstable and charged with motion. The blend of modernist styles amplify the urgency of the woman rather than dissolve it. Her fractured body seems almost unable to remain intact as it races forward, while the tiny surrounding figures echo the larger figure’s flight. Painted immediately after World War II by an artist who had recently returned from wartime military service, the title “Escape to Nowhere” makes the motion especially unsettling. Escape implies hope for somewhere safer, yet “nowhere” denies that destination with a woman propelled forward through a world that offers no obvious refuge.$

@patrickkapty.bsky.social Sep 26, 2026, 7:07 PM

"Phenomena Under Water Winds"
acrylic on canvas
1979
Paul Jenkins (1923-2012)
USA

#handmade #art #modernart #painting #phenomenaunderwaterwinds #PaulJenkins #AmericanArt #AmericanArtist #artwork #abstract #expressionist #controlledchance #phenomenaseries #nontraditionaltechniques #drip #tilt #knife

@patrickkapty.bsky.social Sep 25, 2026, 7:11 PM

"Camouflage"
acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas
c. 1986
Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
USA

#handmade #art #popart #AndyWarhol #camouflage #c1986 #nyc #painting #popartpainting #americanart #americanartist #20thcenturyart

@patrickkapty.bsky.social Sep 23, 2026, 2:05 PM

"Pictograph"
oil and enamel on masonite
1949
Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974)
USA

#handmade #art #modernart #pictograph #AdolphGottlieb #americanart #americanartist #c1949 #painting #modernpainting #oilpainting

@patrickkapty.bsky.social Sep 19, 2026, 5:36 PM

Untitled
paint marker on plexiglass
1981
Keith Haring (1958-1990)
USA

#handmade #keithharing #nyc #art #graffiti #paintmarker #plexiglass #artwork #c1981 #artist #popart #surrealist #eastvillageartscene #americanart #americanartist #lgbt #AIDS