www.etsy.com/listing/4381... #prints #artprints #wallprints #homedecor #gallery #artist #printerest #etsy #SPIRTUALITY #SELFLOVE #GIFTS #SCINARTSTUDIO #painter #womeninart #support #supportive #community #POET #WRITER #painter #LIFE #trauma #truth #yemaya
French artist Paul Gavarni, born Sulpice Guillaume Chevalier in Paris, became famous for lithographs that observed modern life with elegance, wit, and a sharp eye for social performance. This print belongs to that world. In a shaded garden, two young women are caught in a sudden, intimate moment on a painted green bench. The woman at right, with very pale skin and black hair swept into a smooth bun, bends forward from the waist and presses a kiss to the lips of the other woman seated on green wooden bench. She wears a black skirt, a white bodice, and a dark sash that sharpens the curve of her body as she folds over her companion. The seated woman, light-skinned with soft brown curls and pink cheeks, reclines backward in a rose-patterned dress with a blue apron or overskirt spilling across her lap. The standing woman’s hand grips the other woman’s wrist while the the seated woman reaches up with her hand behind the kisser’s neck, making the embrace feel both tender and unstable. A small open booklet lies on the ground below, as if dropped mid-conversation. Dense trees close in overhead, turning the bench into a pocket of privacy, while faint figures in the distance suggest a public park just beyond this private moment. The depiction may be flirtation, affection, satire, or even theatrical mischief as Gavarni leaves the scene open enough to provoke curiosity. That ambiguity is part of the work’s force. The dropped booklet hints at interruption, the diagonal pose creates a sense of motion and risk, and the shadowed setting turns it into a social drama. In the 19th century, such imagery could invite viewers to look with amusement, desire, or moral judgment. Today, the print stands out for preserving an unusually direct image of intimacy between women in a refined, carefully staged popular print. Small in scale but rich in implication, it shows how Gavarni could make a fleeting encounter feel psychologically charged, stylish, and impossible to dismiss.
“Le baiser” (The Kiss) by Paul Gavarni (French) - Crayon lithograph, hand-colored with watercolor / 1837 - Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève (Switzerland) #WomenInArt #PaulGavarni #Gavarni #FrenchArt #RomanticArt #TheKiss #VilledeGenève #MuséedArt #art #artText #arte #FrenchArtist #1830sArt
British-Nigerian artist Ṣọlá Olúlòde (Sola Olulode) made this work in 2020, after studying painting at Brighton, during a period when isolation and longing for touch shaped daily life. She said "Eternal Light" was “of a couple embracing each other,” expressing the physical closeness many people missed in lockdown like “an ode to our loved ones.” Set against a radiant field of saturated yellow, two Black figures are shown in a close embrace at the center of the canvas. One woman stands in front, head tilted inward, with eyes closed and long dark braids falling over one shoulder. A pale circular form, like a halo or luminous crown, rests across the upper forehead. Another woman leans forward to embrace her from behind, with a calm, inward expression. Her hair is gathered into rounded puffs. Both her arms meet across the chest of her companion. The taller woman reaches up to return the embrace as all four hands meet near her heart. Both wear warm red-orange patterned garments. Across the bodies and background, pale wax-resist marks and streaks cut through the paint like flashes of light, giving the scene a layered, glowing, and almost sacred atmosphere. The image could be maternal, familial, friendly, or romantic. Olúlòde leaves tenderness open rather than policing it. Her materials and wax-resist processes draw on batik and Yoruba adire textile traditions, giving the surface a stained, layered, handmade presence. The yellow does not just describe light. It becomes feeling itself like warmth, devotion, protection, and memory. In Olúlòde’s work, Black intimacy is not framed through struggle alone, but through care, softness, and joy. This painting turns embrace into atmosphere with love as shelter, radiance, and survival.
"Eternal Light" by Ṣọlá Olúlòde aka Sola Olulode (British-Nigerian) - Ink, acrylic and wax on canvas / 2020 - Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomenArtists #SolaOlulode #ṢọláOlúlòde #Olulode #arttext #smithsonian #NationalMuseumofAfricanArt #NMAfA
Two dancers stride together across the canvas in a synchronized, rightward motion. Each figure is shown in profile with one heel lifted, elbows bent, and hands poised in a way that suggests rhythm more than literal anatomy. Their skin is rendered in deep brown tones, while their clothing erupts in saturated blue, gold, orange, black, and white patterns with checks, stripes, diamonds, and zigzags that feel like woven textiles translated into paint. White dotted headwraps echo the beat of the repeated shapes. The dark background, interrupted by warm vertical bands, gives the scene a stage-like setting while keeping our focus on the dancers’ bodies and garments. American artist Charles Searles does not paint a realistic performance so much as a visual pulse of repetition, color, and pattern to create the sensation of movement, music, and collective energy. That sense of motion is a highlight of the artist’s work. A Philadelphia-born African American artist, Searles studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and drew lasting inspiration from African art, textiles, and dance. Accounts of his work repeatedly connect his vivid patterning and kinetic forms to those interests. In “Dancers,” the paired figures are almost like variations on a single step, emphasizing continuity, companionship, and ceremony rather than individual portraiture. The painting is joyful, but also disciplined so that every repeated motif helps turn dance into structure. Searles turns dance into a language of memory and identity. The repeated figures suggest echo, ancestry, and shared movement across time, while the vivid blues, golds, oranges, and whites carry the energy of celebration, ceremony, and performance. His bold geometric patterns recall textiles and design traditions linked to Africa and the African diaspora, so the painting is not only motion in the present, but is a visual connection to cultural history, resilience, and joy.
“Dancers” by Charles Searles (American) - Acrylic on canvas / 1975 - Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (Kalamazoo, Michigan) #WomenInArt #CharlesSearles #Searles #KalamazooInstituteOfArts #AfricanAmericanArt #BlackArt #artText #BlueskyArt #DanceArt #AfricanAmericanArtist #BlackArtist #acrylic #1970sArt
#Superwoman #SuperwomanArt #SuperheroArt #FemaleSuperhero #Superheroine #WomanOfSteel #GirlPower #StrongWoman #DigitalArt #ComicArt #FantasyArt #HeroineArt #EmpoweredWomen #ArtOfTheDay #InstaArt #SuperheroIllustration #CharacterDesign #WomenInArt
The title comes from the spiritual “Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep,” a song of sorrow, faith, and promised deliverance. American artist Charles Wilbert White draws on that tradition to make an image of mourning that is also an image of strength. These women can be read as Mary and Martha grieving Lazarus, but White avoids theatrical miracle imagery. Two Black women stand close together. The woman on the left faces outward and avoids our gaze with tired, alert eyes. She wears a light striped headscarf tied at the back and a sleeveless floral dress. Her skin is rendered with rich tonal modeling. Her arms fold across her own chest and midsection, creating a guarded, self-containing posture. The woman on the right turns in profile, her face lifted slightly upward and away. She has short, close dark hair and wears a loose, light-toned blouse with delicate trim at the neckline. One of her hands rises toward her chest while the other rests low across her abdomen. Their arms almost touch at the center, making the composition feel like a single structure of grief, support, and endurance. The background is spare and smoky, so that White’s dense graphite and ink hatching gives full attention to bone, muscle, cloth, and emotional weight. White lingers in the human interval before relief to depict the moment when anguish is carried through touch, breath, and shared presence. That choice is central to his art. In the 1950s, White was devoted to representing Black life with dignity, gravity, and psychological depth, rejecting caricature and sentimentality alike. Here, the women are neither allegorical decoration nor passive sufferers. They are monumental, self-possessed, and emotionally complex. The drawing transforms private grief into collective witness, honoring Black womanhood as a site of resilience, tenderness, and moral force.
“Oh, Mary, Don’t You Weep” by Charles Wilbert White (American) - Graphite, pen, and ink on board / 1956 - Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, Arkansas) #WomenInArt #CharlesWilbertWhite #CharlesWhite #CrystalBridges #BlackArt #AfricanAmericanArt #art #artText #BlackArtist #1950sArt
A portrait of quiet strength and luminous poise—silver fabric, warm skin, and a gaze turned beyond the frame. A study in elegance, presence, and restraint. #FineArt #PortraitPhotography #ArtNude #FineArtNude #GlamourPortrait #FigurativeArt #WomenInArt #ContemporaryArt ralfkwiegand.com
A message in a score 🎼
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#SoniaRealism #womeninart #portraitofawoman #visualpoetry #musicalnotes #photography
Two women are shown from very close range, filling the painting edge to edge. Their heads incline toward one another until the space between them nearly disappears, creating a feeling of privacy and trust. Each woman cradles a wide, white teacup in both hands. Their eyes are lowered, and their expressions are quiet, inward, and calm, as if the act of drinking is also a moment of rest. Both wear light cloths over their heads, painted in creamy white and muted green. The palette is warm and saturated as coral, rose, terracotta, brown, smoky black, and touches of cool green move across the canvas in broad, visible strokes. Their skin is rendered in warm peach-brown and rosy tones, and the hands are simplified but expressive, repeated across the lower half of the image like a rhythm. There is only color and gesture so the women’s shared presence is the whole subject. That intimacy is central to Filipino artist Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s art. She is celebrated for painting Filipina women with dignity, solidarity, and inner life, often focusing on everyday labor or communal ritual rather than spectacle. Here, tea drinking becomes more than a domestic act. It is a shared pause, a small ceremony of warmth, companionship, and replenishment. The women do not look out to meet us. Instead, they remain absorbed in their own moment, which makes the scene feel especially tender and self-possessed. Painted in 1957, the work belongs to Magsaysay-Ho’s mature modernist period, when she used flattened forms, rhythmic contour, and expressive color to distill experience rather than describe it literally. As the only woman associated with the Thirteen Moderns in the Philippines, she helped reshape modern Filipino painting while returning again and again to women’s worlds as sites of strength, beauty, and mutual care. This painting turns closeness itself into the subject with companionship as sustenance.
“Tea Drinkers” by Anita Magsaysay-Ho (Filipina) - Oil on canvas / 1957 - National Gallery Singapore #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #AnitaMagsaysayHo #MagsaysayHo #AnitaMagsaysay-Ho #Magsaysay-Ho #NationalGallerySingapore #FilipinoArt #FilipinoArtist #arte #art #artText #1950sArt
Two young women sit close together on a stone ledge before a broad view of Mount Vesuvius in Italy. The woman at right faces us directly, upright and calm, her pale skin softly lit and her dark hair crowned with green vine leaves. She wears a voluminous white blouse, a deep blue apron, gold jewelry, and large dangling earrings. Her companion’s arm curves around her shoulders in a protective, intimate gesture. The second woman leans her head against the other’s chest and shoulder, tilting her face toward us with a quieter, more wistful expression. She wears a red dress with a white chemise and patterned bodice, layered necklaces, and a blue-and-red headscarf. At left, her hand holds a large tambourine decorated with red roundels and small jingles. Behind them, the volcano rises under a pale sky, its plume drifting outward, while a small building and dark cypress trees anchor the distant landscape. French artist Guillaume Bodinier gives the scene both tenderness and theatricality. The closeness of the women reads first as companionship, even affection as one figure shelters, the other yields, and their linked bodies create a quiet emotional center. At the same time, the costume, tambourine, vine crown, and southern setting turn them into an imagined vision of Italy shaped for a French audience hungry for travel, beauty, and regional “types.” The alternate title, Les filles de Procida, suggests a more specific local identity tied to the island near Naples, though the sitters themselves are not named. Vesuvius is essential to the painting’s mood. It is picturesque, but its drifting smoke also introduces unease, placing youthful beauty beside a reminder of instability and change. Painted in 1835, after Bodinier’s Italian studies and travels, the work balances academic finish with Romantic feeling via polished surfaces, idealized faces, and a carefully staged intimacy that invites us to see these women as a pair bound by closeness, poise, and shared presence.
“Jeunes napolitaines (Young Neapolitan Women)” by Guillaume Bodinier (French) - Oil on canvas / 1835 - Villa Vauban (Luxembourg) #WomenInArt #GuillaumeBodinier #Bodinier #VillaVauban #art #arte #arttext #FrenchArt #FrenchArtist #BlueskyArt #Romanticism #MuseeVillaVauban #PortraitOfWomen #1830sArt
My latest painting!
16x20 acrylic on gallery depth canvas
“Sky Blue”
#art #artistsofbluesky #womeninart #painting #womenartists #horses #sky #expression
#Geisha #Maiko #Geiko #Kyoto #Japan #JapaneseCulture #JapaneseTradition #CulturalHeritage #TraditionalArts #Kimono #Shamisen #TeaCeremony #Hanamachi #JapaneseArtists #WomenInArt #DocumentaryPhotography #PhotoEssay #CulturalPhotography #TravelPhotography #JapanTravel #KyotoCulture #StreetPhotography
SUNDAY REPOST
#Art #artist #kunst #Dutchart #Dutchartist #OutsiderArt #Affordable #ArtCollector #ArtGallery #ArtLover #Kunstliefhebber #kunstkopen #WomenArtists #WomensArt #WomeninArt #painting #schilderij #expressionist #essentialist #acrylic #oilpainting #portrait
A large square painting shows two stylized women pressed close together against a dark, nearly black-blue background alive with looping, chalk-like lines in white, violet, blue, and green. In the foreground, a seated woman dominates the composition. Her body is rendered in hot reds and crimson-pinks, with outlined breasts, and one long arm holding her bent knees. Her skin is not naturalistic, but transformed into glowing red tones that make the body feel heated, theatrical, and emotionally charged. Her face is elongated, with dark shadowed eyes, red lips, and pale, tangled hair flaring upward and outward. Behind and beside her is a second woman in deep green, her lighter face framed by loose curls and a dramatic wide red hat. The figures seem enveloped by a haze of scribbled marks, as if smoke, energy, memory, or music were moving around them. The title “Girlfriends” turns closeness into the subject of the work. Russian artist Edouard Zelenine does not paint these women as calm portrait sitters. He makes them electric, unstable, glamorous, and slightly dreamlike. The intense red of the foreground figure suggests heat, desire, exposure, and vulnerability, while the second woman, partly veiled in green and shadow, feels like companion, witness, or intimate counterpart. The museum’s LGBTQ tagging is fitting here as the painting invites a reading of female intimacy that exceeds ordinary sociability and enters the territory of romance, erotic charge, and queer visibility. By 1984, Zelenine had long since left the Soviet Union and was living in France, and that biographical shift matters. This image feels shaped by exile as much as by performance. Identity is staged, but not fixed. Affection is visible, but not fully explained. The women become both real presences and emotional symbols of desire, companionship, artifice, and freedom.
“Girlfriends” by Эдуард Зеленин / Edouard Zelenine (Russian, active in France) - Oil on canvas / 1984 - Mead Art Museum at Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts) #WomenInArt #EdouardZelenine #ЭдуардЗеленин #Zelenine #MeadArtMuseum #AmherstCollege #arte #artText #artwork #RussianArtist #1980sArt
Old corner 🪞
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Sonia Guasch
#SoniaRealism #womeninart #portraitofawoman #visualpoetry #timelessplaces #photography
The title suggests emotional ease, but American artist Maxfield Parrish makes contentment feel constructed as much as felt. By 1927, he was one of the most famous image-makers in the United States, celebrated for painstaking technique, glowing layered color, and scenes that could move easily between fine art and mass reproduction. This picture belongs to his well-known “girls on rocks” era, a formula that became enormously popular through commercial commissions, including an Edison Mazda calendar. Two young women sit close together on a sunlit rocky ledge in a dreamlike landscape. The woman at left sits higher, her body turned three-quarters toward us, one knee drawn up and loosely encircled by her arms. Her other leg extends downward over the rock face, her bare foot suspended in open air. Her draped garment is warm brown with violet undertones, catching amber light across the shoulder and thigh. She has light skin and softly waved golden hair. She glances down at a second young woman beside her who has fair skin and darker brown hair and sits lower on the ledge in a pale lilac-pink dress. She leans slightly forward and tilts her face toward the sun, creating a quiet moment of each witnessing beauty. Behind them rises a massive field of deep violet shadow, broken only at the top by distant blue and rose-tinted mountains. Parrish paints the stone in glowing oranges, mauves, and purples, so that the figures seem held between warmth and coolness plus nearness and distance so nothing interrupts the mood. The painting sits between fantasy and advertising as well as intimacy and design. The women are calm, but they are also arranged with precision to become emblems of serenity in a modern visual marketplace hungry for beauty, light, and escape. Parrish’s gift was to make artifice feel effortless. The result is both tender and slightly unreal with companionship as atmosphere, leisure as ideal, and femininity transformed into a radiant, collectible dream.
“Contentment” by Maxfield Parrish (American) - Oil on masonite / 1927 - National Museum of American Illustration (Newport, Rhode Island) #WomenInArt #MaxfieldParrish #Parrish #MaxParrish #NMAI #NationalMuseumofAmericanIllustration #arte #art #artText #AmericanArtist #AmericanArt #1920sArt
A light show 🕯️
Sonia Guasch
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@soniagh46
#SoniaRealism #womeninart #portraitofawoman #visualpoetry #lightplay #photography
Two young Japanese women stand pressed close beneath pale pink cherry blossoms, their bodies arranged almost as a single shape against a saturated blue ground. Both wear softly patterned morning kimonos opened low at the chest, one in greenish tones and the other in warmer brown-gold, with thick obi belts tied behind them like sculptural wings. Their skin is pale, their cheeks lightly flushed, and their black hair is dressed in smooth, glossy coils pinned with blossoms. They face us calmly, almost solemnly, but their hands meet at the center in a gesture that feels private and deliberate. The plate’s printed caption reads PETITES_AMIES, and the vertical cartouche bears the artist’s Japanese name, 英一蝶 (Hana Itchō known as Hanabusa Itchō). The image is decorative, but not distant as the closeness of their bodies, the touch of their joined hands, and the mirrored elegance of their pose make the pair feel intimate and composed. The original text around this illustration sharpens that intimacy into meaning. The women are introduced as “enlacées ainsi” (entwined like that) to hold each other. A few pages later, the narrator insists, “Elles ne se quittent jamais” or they never leave one another. Another line says they are not deceived by love, but have outwitted it and hold it “captif sur leurs lèvres pareilles” (captive on their matching lips). Those phrases transform the image from a pretty Belle Époque fantasy into a vision of feminine attachment imagined as mutual pleasure, refuge, and alliance. At the same time, the work belongs to a French japoniste book culture that stylized Japan for Parisian readers, so its beauty is inseparable from European performance and projection. That tension is part of its power now. The print offers cherry blossoms, elegance, and theatrical grace, but also a rare early-20th-century image in which two women appear not merely adjacent, but bound to one another by touch, companionship, and choice.
“Petites Amies” (Girlfriends) by 英一蝶 / Hanabusa Itchō (Japanese) - Color engraving / 1912 - Poupée japonaise (Paris, France) #WomenInArt #英一蝶 #HanabusaIttcho #hanabusa #挿絵#BookIllustration #Japonisme #ジャポニスム #art #artText #artwork #美人画 #JapaneseArt #JapaneseArtist #日本美術 #百合 #BelleEpoque #1910sArt
What makes the picture gripping is that it stages deception as intimacy. Simhika does not attack; she escorts. Draupadi is not shown as defeated, but as alert, vulnerable, and morally luminous amid danger. Both women move close together through a dim forest path. On the right, Draupadi wears a vivid red sari edged in gold. Her skin is light brown, her face tense, and her body pulled inward. She clasps both hands high near her chin, as if bracing herself. Her eyes are wide, giving the impression that she senses danger before she fully understands it. On the left, Simhika appears calm, almost companionable. She wears a dark blue-black sari with a red blouse, jewelry on her neck and ears, and flowers tucked into her hair. One arm circles behind Draupadi’s shoulders while the other hand gestures ahead, as though politely guiding her onward. Legendary Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma sets them against tall tree trunks, dense foliage, and a narrow opening of light in the distance. The softness of the brushwork makes the forest feel lush but also enclosing. Ravi Varma, who became famous for merging European academic realism with Indian epic and devotional subjects, often gave mythological figures the emotional immediacy of living people. Here, he turns a narrative from the Mahābhārata into a study of trust, threat, and feminine presence. The red of Draupadi’s sari reads almost like an alarm within the green-brown woods, while Simhika’s darker dress helps her blend into the forest and into the role of hidden menace. The scene also reflects Ravi Varma’s gift for making epic women psychologically legible. Draupadi is not just a literary heroine, but a person caught in the instant when courtesy, fear, and intuition collide.
“Draupadi and the Enchantress Simhika” by Raja Ravi Varma (Indian) - Oil on canvas / 1898 - Sree Chitra Art Gallery (Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala) #WomenInArt #RajaRaviVarma #Varma #SreeChitraArtGallery #IndianArt #Mahabharata #art #artText #artwork #GaneshShivaswamyFoundation #IndianArtist #1890sArt
Created this character for @tabcreations.com
I wanted to give her a powerful, commanding presence with a touch of mystery someone who looks like she’s seen everything and still stands unshaken.
#characterdesign #dnd #art #ttrpg #artistsonbsky #illustration #fantasyart #womeninart #originalcharacter
Painted in 1864, this watercolor belongs to British artist Simeon Solomon’s early, ambitious engagement with classical and poetic subjects. Solomon, still a young artist in his twenties and closely associated with Pre-Raphaelite circles, turned to Sappho as a figure through whom desire, lyric beauty, and ambiguous identity could be imagined with unusual frankness. Two young women sit close together on a curved stone bench inside a lush, enclosed garden. At left, Erinna wears a soft rose-pink robe that slips from one shoulder, exposing part of her upper chest and emphasizing the tenderness and vulnerability of the pose. At right, Sappho leans in, dressed in warm yellow-gold drapery, her arm wrapped around Erinna as their faces nearly touch. Their dark hair, pale skin, and calm, inward expressions create a mood of stillness rather than drama. Around them, Solomon scatters symbolic details like petals and flowers on the ground, two doves perched behind them, a darker bird nearby, a small deer beside Erinna, and, near Sappho, the attributes of poetry and music. The figures feel both intimate and ceremonial, suspended in a private world of touch and affection. Victorian viewers often linked Sappho and Erinna romantically, even though that historical pairing is now understood to be anachronistic. That tension matters as the painting is not a documentary reconstruction of antiquity, but a 19th-century dream of female intimacy, literary companionship, and queer longing. Solomon makes that longing legible without making it crude. The doves suggest paired love. The darker bird introduces unease or interruption. The deer evokes a sacred, poetic realm. The result is delicate but radical. It's an image that treats closeness between women as cultured, beautiful, and emotionally serious rather than marginal. Tate acquired the work in 1980, and it remains one of Solomon’s most resonant pieces on desire, classicism, and imagined lesbian history.
"Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene" by Simeon Solomon (British) - Watercolor on paper / 1864 - Tate Britain (London, England) #WomenInArt #SimeonSolomon #Solomon #TateBritain #art #artText #arte #Watercolor #Watercolour #VictorianArt #BritishArt #PreRaphaelite #Pre-Raphaelite #1860sArt
Two women stand so closely that their bodies almost read as a single mirrored shape. Each turns in profile side by side facing left, and each places one hand on one breast of the other woman, making touch a central feature of the image rather than a minor detail. Their heads incline together in an atmosphere of privacy and mutual awareness. The painting is small, but its scale intensifies the feeling of closeness. This is a work meant for careful inspection. Opaque watercolor creates rich, saturated color and clean, controlled contours, while touches of gold add a delicate shimmer. As in many Rajput miniatures, stylization matters because the women’s forms are idealized, graceful, and composed, but the emotional effect is immediate. Their pose can multiple things at once including affectionate, erotic, playful, courtly, or ritualized. Rather than presenting one woman as the object of another’s gaze, the image stages reciprocity, with each figure equally active in the exchange. Harvard dates the work to the 18th century and places it in Rajasthan, probably Bundi or Kotah, two closely related painting centers known for lyrical figuration, refined courtly imagery, and expressive color. The modern title, “Two Friendly Ladies,” softens the charge of the scene, but the image itself leaves room for a more layered reading of female intimacy. It may picture idealized companions, lovers, or courtly beauties, and its power lies partly in refusing to collapse those possibilities into a single explanation. That openness helps explain why the work remains so compelling in a museum context today. It has appeared in many exhibitions where its subject could be seen not simply as decorative elegance, but as a rare and memorable visualization of closeness between women in South Asian painting. The result is tender, charged, and quietly radical: a miniature that asks us to take female relationship seriously as a subject in itself.
“Two Friendly Ladies” by Unknown artist (Indian) - Opaque watercolor and gold on paper / c. 1700s - Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, Massachusetts) #WomenInArt #HarvardArtMuseums #IndianArt #art #artwork #arte #artText #RajputPainting #1700sArt #SouthAsianArt #Harvard #watercolor #RajasthaniPainting
Checking in 🗝️
@soniagh46
#SoniaRealism #womeninart #portraitofawoman #visualpoetry #arrival #photography
Checking in 🗝️
@soniagh46
#SoniaRealism #womeninart #portraitofawoman #visualpoetry #arrival #photography
Two women recline side by side on a sofa (one from the left and the other from the right) their bodies stretched across the canvas with the easy confidence of people who fully belong where they are. South African artist Zandile Tshabalala dresses them in leopard-print slips and gives them striking red lipstick, details that make the painting feel lush, glamorous, and confident. Their poses echo the long European tradition of the reclining nude, but this scene refuses passivity. These women are not offered up for our fantasy. They occupy the canvas on their own terms. The mood is both intimate and alert. Even in repose, they project control. The surface is decorative and bold, with color and pattern doing as much emotional work as anatomy. Rather than treating Black femininity as marginal or secondary, Tshabalala makes it central, sensuous, and unmistakably modern. That reversal is at the heart of the painting’s power. Born in Soweto , South Africa in 1999, Tshabalala has spoken about wanting to bring Black women forward in a history of art that so often pushed them to the edge or cast them in compromised roles. Here, she answers the old genre of the odalisque and reclining nude with a new image of beauty, leisure, and self-definition. Rest becomes a political and poetic space. The women do not need to explain themselves. Their presence is enough. In the context of "When We See Us," a landmark exhibition centered on Black self-representation and Black joy, the painting feels especially resonant. It is luxurious, yes, but also corrective like a declaration that softness, vanity, beauty, sensuality, and rest all belong within the visual language of Black life. Tshabalala turns a familiar art-historical format into something freer and more generous, replacing the outsider’s gaze with one grounded in dignity, pleasure, and self-possession.
“Two Reclining Women” by Zandile Tshabalala (South African) - Acrylic on canvas / 2020 - Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town, South Africa) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #ZandileTshabalala #Tshabalala #ZeitzMOCAA #art #artText #MOCAA #BlackArtist #SouthAfricanArt #SouthAfricanArtist #BlackArt
Terminada en el fin de semana largo. Esperando a su propietaria, que llegará el fin de semana.
#Art
#WomenInArt
