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Richard Estes, The Coastline of Maine, Oil on board, 13 7/8 x 19 1/2 inches.

 

Richard Estes (born 1932) is best known for his complex photo-realistic images of urban shop windows and their mind-eye confounding reflections. However, his work also attests to a well-traveled eye for distant places, including Mount Desert Island and Lake Champlain. While helping Alice Walton select artworks destined for the permanent collection of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, she fell in love with one Este’s icy views of a massive, calving ice-shelf in Antarctica. Before the museum opened, we installed the painting just inside the front door of her rural Texas ranch house, greeting visitors with its chilling blast of frozen air—at once welcoming and disorienting—in much the same way as his better-known images of concatenated reflections distort and confuse and visually echo New York’s windowed storefronts.

A contrarian by nature and trained on American realism at the Art Institute of Chicago—Eakins, Homer, Hopper, etc.—it is possible that Estes’s style developed out of healthy skepticism for the primacy of either realism or abstraction. Why not both? That is to say, his use of photography for paintings seems to suggest precise replication of photographic sources. His paintings, however, are not that.  Instead, Estes often combines views from multiple photographs and slightly shifted perspectives — combining both close-up and background spaces — that no human eye, nor the camera, is capable of clearly seeing at the same time in sharp focus.

His landscapes, moreover, examine and celebrate the mostly uncelebrated, more intimate views of nature underfoot or from points of view largely determined by diminishing visual access—whether from the wake-racing deck of a tourist boat on Lake Champlain or a crowded mountain hiking trail on Mt. Cadillac in Acadia National Park. It has become nearly impossible to personally experience wilderness in America, perhaps another reason Estes paints with such close, detailed passion.

It is also no surprise that the pre-eminent art historian of 19th-century American painting, John Wilmerding, whose groundbreaking National Gallery of Art exhibition (Washington, D.C., 1980) devoted to American Luminism, which tellingly included the Maine paintings of Fitz Henry Lane and Frederic Church, among others, was a huge fan of Estes’s work. “Estes brings two consummate talents to his art,” Este’s Mount Desert neighbor, Wilmerding explains, “the ability to select out of the random chaos and imperfections of the world around him something worth looking at, and the rarified craftsmanship to transform that view into something cleansed and purified, orderly and even harmonious.[1] This phenomenological approach, and the artist’s 21st century adherence to perceptual dislocations, is revealed in these side-long, panoramic tourist-boat-framed and distant vistas and in Estes’s downward-looking views of the forest understory—broken, twisting limbs and winter’s dark leaf leavings. He gives us the numinous remains of summers’ past, never to be seen again. There is no 19th-century, romantic sublime here, these unfixed, near and far, vast and complex, “God-bothered,” lands.[2]

Through August 1

Christopher B. Crosman

Thomaston, Maine