Esther Kirshenbaum

There is an expansive, quiet, yet ferocious wisdom that pervades this series and demands of the viewer an unexpected silence, an internal questioning, and a moment to pause and consider - and reconsider - the purpose and meaning, or lack thereof, in our role on the planet. Yet the mood is also one of enchantment and a controlled emotionality - the sheer visceral beauty of her media and technique, her magnetic use of perspective and proportion, and her achingly synesthetic use of color forms an encounter with mystery, spirit, and what is unknown within the known. 

Jim Robert, education expert writes: Esther Kirshenbaum’s Anonymous: A Memoir
(link to Jim Robert’s TED talk: Untapped Self)

The first time I stood before Esther’s series Anonymous, my right hand immediately went to my heart.  It was an unconscious, visceral reaction that preceded the flood of thoughts I knew would soon arrive.  Keeping my thoughts at bay, I felt what all inspirational art is capable of making me feel—more fully alive— and for the briefest of moments, there was just feeling, as if my heart was opening itself to a familiar wound my hand reflexively needed to cover up. Despite the featureless faces of the figures, inhabiting spaces strangely familiar, I felt them reaching out to me, speaking to me, touching me.  For a moment, I eerily recognized myself looking out at myself from her work.  I left them the way I often leave myself:  uncertain, dumbfounded, and confused to be sure, but also knowing I would return. 

And I did return, one November day, grey and cold, for an afternoon of conversation and a more intimate viewing.  This time, distant memories of Herman Hesse’s masterpiece The Glass Bead Game washed over me as I took up a position that allowed for the entire series to be viewed as a whole.  Thoughts of the novel’s fictional city Castalia, home to a cloister of highly evolved human beings suddenly appeared before me.  I couldn’t help but wonder if the figures in these paintings might also have devoted their lives to playing something like the game whose rules and contours remain so elusive throughout Hesse’s novel.  It was easy to imagine that the figures looking out at me had somehow mastered Hesse’s imaginary game, as they too seemed to embody a higher purpose or some deeper understanding of the human condition.

Later, Esther shared with me her artist’s statement, and I was not surprised to discover the ideas behind what I could already feel in this work—her own personal struggle with some of the fundamental contradictions in life—Essence and Form; Simplicity and Complexity; Peace and Violence; Tranquility and Chaos. If, as she wrote, the shadowy figures are capable of carrying within them Truths that are beyond the intellect, it was easy to imagine they had somehow reconciled these great contradictions within their own individual and collective souls, something she and I were both struggling to do in our conversation that cold, grey afternoon.  What this reconciliation might mean and how it was achieved remains the untold secret of her work.

Again, and again, I was called back into the paintings, even as our own conversation deepened.  What began as a discussion of her concern with the destructive nature of Homo sapiens, soon flowed into her skepticism at man’s ability to nurture and protect the natural environment, a view that contrasted with my own.  What became increasingly clear as the afternoon light in her studio waned, was that the battle raging in Esther’s soul, the great unresolved question she had been carrying for much of her life— “Are human beings capable of inhabiting the Earth without destroying the natural environment and if so, how?”, had in fact, been mysteriously resolved by the figures in her hauntingly beautiful work.  I couldn’t help but muse about what they might have added to our conversation. 

I wondered if the figures in her work might understand Esther’s great question and the contradiction it grew out of differently, perhaps as no contradiction at all; an illusion spun from a unity of opposites only they could see. I also wondered if the great secret they seemed to harbor was plumbed from the depth of this great unity between human beings and the Earth, between man and his environment, between Esther’s views and my own; as if the only great hurdle left for us to overcome was the perspective limiting our respective views, and that their transcendent lives were not a product of their anonymity—of having gone beyond ego and gender, age, religion, fear or attachment to possessions—but rather from embracing more fully all of these characteristically human qualities; as if we needed to become, each in our own lives, the great work of art those spectral figures had already achieved.

Lou Glorie, writer, political activist, and philosopher captures the essence of the work here:

I think this work will resonate with people who love this world in a very sensual, tangible way -- we are the people who are in mourning. If one loves this world we've been given, the deification of abstracts like "the market," "progress," "growth," etc. are cause for rage and despair. The souls portrayed here are longing for the sensual, sentient world we're killing. Our mission is a selfish one. This planet will endure until the sun grows cold. It's our own habitat -- physical and spiritual that we're killing. We cannot survive this death.