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]

Christopher B. Crosman

Thomaston, Maine

[1] John Wilmerdign, Richard Estes, (New York, Rizzoli, 2006), 219

[2] Sebastian Smee describing the paintings of Frederic Church, “The Artist Who Made America Look Like a Promised Land,” The New Yorker, May 11 & 18, 20026 print edition.