The Artwork of Esther Zibell

Esther Zibell is a French born artist who presently lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She is mostly self-taught and has been painting since her childhood. In the eighties, she became observant and dedicated her work to Biblical and Hassidic themes, with a blend of imagination and originality. In 2008-09 she studied the art of print-making in the Art Students League of New York.

The subjects of Zibell’s paintings and prints range from landscapes, to still lifes, to portraits, to biblical and family scenes. There are even a few cosmic visions populated by birds and psychedelic ginkgo leaves. But like all artists, her true subject is her own inner world. That world is charged with empathy and love, a deep Jewish consciousness, closeness to nature, and a joyous connection to womanhood, especially as expressed through portraits of women young and old, wedding scenes, and mothers and children.

Somehow she has preserved the secret wellsprings of innocence with her art, even in her Holocaust paintings and contemplations of aging and loneliness. Her Jewish subjects are richly expressive of her love for the Jewish people, past and present; the otherworldly aura of the Sabbath; and her symbolist conceptions of biblical stories, ever from a woman’s point of view.