Esther Warkov: the Universal in the Personal

Beverley J. Rasporich. Magic on Main: The Art of Esther Warkov (2003). I bought this book some years ago at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and read it over the last two or three days. Warkov’s technical skill is astonishing. Her inventiveness even more so. This book is an attempt to come to terms with her work, but the author, wisely, I think, doesn’t over-explicate the pictures. She gives us a blend of biography and artistic development, which together with beautifully reproduced images of the pictures show us Esther Warkov as she is, or rather, as she allows herself to be seen.
     Warkov’s drawings are collocations of many images, some layered over each other, others transforming from one into the other. Subtle colouring achieved with coloured pencils over graphite add a feeling of dream and half-forgotten memories. Warkov makes art deliberately, she wants her imagery to mean and to signify. But exactly what they signify she leaves up to the viewer to decode. Allusions to her Jewish heritage, to contemporary anxieties, to modern life, to objects of personal value, these create a dense mesh of – something, which leads the imagination into unexpected byways. Every time you look at one of her pictures, you see something other than what you recalled of it.
     Warkov moved from precisely composed paintings, many on shaped canvases, to drawings on paper, to three-dimensional assemblages of folded, rolled, creased, cut-out drawings. She dubs the latter “three dimensional drawings,” made almost entirely of paper, but looking like wood, rusty metal, decaying clothes, faded photographs, bits of vegetation, vases, gloves, body parts – an exhaustive list would take some time to concoct.

  Tea House. Collection of Winnipeg Art Gallery.

     I like her work as presented here. Partly it’s the sheer craft skill of her work, but mostly it’s the unapologetically personal vision. She doesn’t make art to satisfy some current fashion of subject or style, or to accommodate some perceived demand of the art market. She makes art to make her own life meaningful. She shows us that the intensely and plainly personal is the universal. The book is available on the web, but there’s very little information about her. ****