Facets of Eros The Drawings of Claire Wilks

In Facets of Eros, David Sobelman, an award-winning writer of documentaries, explores the early drawings of Canadian artist Claire Wilks, their presciently feminist visual vocabulary. He does so by looking at the drawings—so open in their sexuality, so puzzling in their vision of motherhood, so sensually affirming in their engagement with death in the Shoah camps—through the lens of that ancient figure Eros, as first discussed by Plato. This is a startling, original approach to a startling, original artist, the meta-portrait of a singular woman who expressed the world she saw around her with her hands.

David Sobelman is a writer of feature-length documentaries (Runaways: 24 Hours on the Street, 1987; McLuhan’s Wake, 2002; Samuel Bak: Painter of Questions, 2004). His first book of poetry, After the End, was published in 2006 (Guernica). He has also published several literary and philosophical essays. Born to an old Jewish French family in Haifa, Israel, Sobelman was schooled in Europe. In 1972, he moved to Toronto to study film and literature at York University. After graduating, he decided to stay in exile and make his home in Canada. Claire Wilks was a Canadian artist who worked in drawing, brush drawing, lithography, monoprinting, and sculpture in bronze and clay. Her works are in numerous private collections in Canada and abroad, and they have been exhibited in the National Gallery of Canada, and in Toronto, Calgary, Stockholm, New York, Jerusalem, Venice, Rome, Zagreb, Mexico City, and Monterrey, Mexico. She died in 2017.