Magic Off Main: The Art of Esther Warkov

Kathy E. Zimon is a fine arts librarian (emerita) at the University of
Calgary. She is the author of Alberta Society of Artists: The First 70
Years and co-editor of Art Documentation Bulletin of the Art Libraries
Society of North America.

In Magic Off Main, Beverly Rasporich revisits the life and art of
Winnipeg artist Esther Warkov that she first explored in Western
Place/Women’s Space (2001). That excellent study guide on CD-ROM
discussed Warkov along with two very different woman artists from
Western Canada, Irene McCaugherty and Susan Ross; but Warkov’s art and
persona are powerful enough to merit the more sustained focus of this
book.

Born in 1941 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant parents, Esther Warkov grew
up in the ethnically diverse community of North End Winnipeg, where her
father’s business supplied leather goods and machinery parts to
prairie farmers. Although her education was encouraged, Warkov did not
shine in school, and it was her fortuitously failing Grade 11 that
introduced her, via a math tutor, to jewellery-making. That led to
summer art school and, in 1958, to the University of Manitoba School of
Art, where she met such prominent artists as Ivan Eyre. She studied
sculpture, then painting, but concentrated on individual experimentation
and self-teaching, and in 1961 abandoned a diploma to work in her own
studio—a garage built by her father that she still uses. Through
marriage, the birth of a daughter, divorce, and subsequent decades of
increased recognition, Warkov’s “lonely passion” was her art.
Rasporich deftly evokes the milieu of postwar Winnipeg and identifies
the imagery derived from the domestic and urban prairie environment of
Warkov’s early years that recurs in her paintings, drawings, and what
the artist calls “three-dimensional drawings,” which resemble paper
sculptures or collages. The book’s strength and substance (two of its
three chapters) consist of extensive analyses of Warkov’s complex,
postmodern, surrealist art, informed by her Jewish heritage but with
references to Christian iconography, and subtly interpreted here in
terms of both her personal history and the social context.

This slim, softcover volume, illustrated by 50 full-colour
reproductions, is highly recommended for all Canadian art and/or
women’s studies collections.