Arts & Leisure
by Steven Ruhl
If someone tells you the current exhibit by Donna’ Estabrooks is “pedestrian,” they probably don’t mean that it’s dull or ordinary. Chances are, they’re referring to the fact that, to see it all, you have to do some walking.
Estabrooks, an artist in residence at UMass, has essentially turned all of downtown Amherst into an art gallery. Until June 7, in a project called “Everything Seems Possible,” she’s showing 56 paintings in six restaurants, a bank, a stationery store, and a printing shop.
A viewer can sample the work randomly, while dropping in for coffee and a sandwich or while buying envelopes or getting some xeroxing done. Or – in a modest variation on the I8th-century custom of “The Grand Tour,” whereby cultivated young English people were sent to the Continent to roam about gazing at famous paintings – a viewer can undertake to start at South Pleasant Street and wander over to Triangle Street, seeing all of Estabrooks’ work en route. It’s aesthetic! It’s peripatetic! And it’s a great concept.
At Bonducci’s, Estabrooks is displaying two series of site-specific acrylic paintings: “Silent Prayers” uses stenciling and repetition, an engaging roughness of texture and execution, a palette of pink, blue, and violet, and a carefree incorporation of scratched surfaces and collaged bits of lacy gauze in its arrangements of hearts, letters, and numbers, while “Primary Concerns” is bouncy and bright.
In the Upper Crust she has a series of lithographs. They’re intentionally primitive, expressionistic, dense, with silhouettes of childlike animals, houses, factories, apocalyptic fire and raging wind, and they’re rendered in scrawled lines, strong segments of black and frayed patches of white.
In Panda East the display includes “Allison,” in acrylic on canvas; it’s an airily balanced composition of a central green square overlapping a purple one, a wavelike squiggle of black, a horizontal band of blue and four lower gold squares against a swath of lavender.
At Classe Cafe an extensive range of more than 15 paintings and prints, many of them in pastel
colors, includes “Big Brother,” with its charmingly crude and cartoonish big blue cars and its elaboration of Estabrooks’ image of a black-suited businessman, which recurs in much of her work, and “Bride,” in which the blindfolded woman stands in her frosted gown against tilting houses and a sort-of Kandinsky background.
At Amherst Deli, her work includes “The Painter,” a mixed media collage of oil on canvas and found objects, with a pink face sporting green shades, Estabrooks’ childlike houses and businessmen motif, slashes of color, and the artist’s paint-spattered apron affixed to the canvas. Estabrooks also has paintings at Judies, at Hastings, at the Northampton Cooperative Bank, and at the Copy Cat Print Shop.
Seen individually, some of the work is more powerful than others, but viewed in its entirely the show is impressive for its “try-anything” diversity of media, its unity, its success with both simple, figurative images and abstraction, its range of dominant colors – from subtle, pale mauves and blues to splashy, alarm-clock reds and yellows – and its emotional tone. Estabrook’s work can convey dread and terror, goofiness and optimism, sometimes in the same painting.
One of Estabrook’s goals in setting up the “Everything Seems Possible” exhibit was to get her work out of galleries and into public spaces where a whole new audience could see it. “I love gallery shows, but this is a great alternative,” she says. “Maybe it’s not as prestigious, but I’m getting the best response from it that I’ve ever had; people have been coming up to me since the show opened two weeks ago, saying, ‘You do this?’
“I’ve sold work in New York at high-class art parties, and was very I determined to make it there; I knew which of my paintings were selling, but I began to realize that thinking this way would compromise my work,” she continues. “And it was getting so boring, doing two gallery shows a year; I’d think. ‘Is this all there is?” I decided I didn’t like the New York scene; I decided I wanted to be an artist here where I live and work in Amherst.”
And so one day recently, sitting in Classe Cafe, she impulsively asked if she could hang some paintings. The response was favorable, and within minutes she was hurrying to other stored and restaurants with a hot idea: she’d place her work all over town. Two hours later, it was all set.
“Everything Seems Possible” was on it way from brainstorm to reality.
Sounds lucky? “I’m a lucky person,” Estabrooks confirms, laughing,”That’s why I gave the show that name. If you go after something, you’ll get it.”
She adds, “There’s more confidence and positive spirit in my recent work, and I’m gutsier with color; it’s like ‘Go ahead throw that yellow on there! I like to go back to that pure sense of art, like you see in kids’ work. I love sitting down with kids and painting. If you tell them, ‘Paint a picture of yourself 50 years ago,’ they go nuts; they’re so creative. I also like Paul Kier and Balthus, and Terry Rumble, and Joan Snyder, and Patricia Faye. I like to try different things. That’s one of the great things about being an artist; there are no rules. You can do what you want!”
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