Courage under fire

Estabrooks explores the power of hope

by Leon Nigrosh

SEEING MAGIC: ART WORK BY DONNA ESTABROOKS At the ARTSWorcesterGallery, Quinsigamond Community College, 670 West Boylston Street, through October 27.

Novice writers are admonished to write what they know. Neophyte painters are advised to paint what they see. For Florence, Massachusetts, artist Donna Estabrooks, it is a little bit of neither. She rarely knows what her paintings and drawings will look like until she's finished. And even then, the meaning of a work often is not realized fully until some time later.

This is not to say that Estabrooks's oil pastels, acrylics, and mixed-media works are opaque and abstruse. To the contrary, her works are open, lively, and attractive. Angels and princesses share canvases animated with flowers, birds, and cats. The compositions abound with trees, houses, and landscape elements. Even if you look no further than at what is on the surface, you easily can enjoy this colorful feast of 40 works on display at Quinsigamond Community College and come away feeling fulfilled.

Take the time to absorb the things that Estabrooks has offered us, and you will gain a deeper and more meaningful understanding about the artist, her work, and perhaps yourself. Although the exhibit is titled after one of Estabrooks's paintings, Seeing Magic, the images are not about prestidigitation or trickery, but about the magic -- the little miracles -- of everyday life.

Estabrooks admits that most of the elements in her paintings and drawings come to her as she works. A practicing Buddhist for the past 11 years, she has learned to accept things in life as they come, but with an immovable underlying sense of joy. Her relaxed state of mind allows images to arise and freely associate with each other in her canvases.

It was shortly after a miscarriage in 1996 that black birds began to appear in Estabrooks's paintings. Usually such creatures portend darker circumstances. But, while preparing for a healing totem commission, Estabrooks discovered a Native-American quotation that spoke about the magic qualities of the raven as "a power of the unknown at work" and that something special is about to happen." With this newfound knowledge, Estabrooks could produce the title painting and fill it with seed pods and flowers in full bloom that surround a princess as she communes with a raven, all under a watchful and benevolent third eye.

The large black bird is also present in The Raven Finds Me, a mixed-media work that features the bird and a curled up woman, along with the words "and wakes me." Again we are led to the suggestion that this mysterious bird can have a positive effect on a situation if we will only let it.

Bicycles play an important role in two of Estabrooks's works. In the small oil pastel, The Gift, the bike is pelted with rain as a dark figure under an umbrella stands to one side. As odd and desolate as this scene might appear, the image exudes an inexplicable feeling of hope. The larger acrylic, Courage, with its prominent black bicycle, a determined white-faced individual, and a collage of torn maps, presents us with another uplifting sensibility. That these works can trigger such positive emotional responses become more remarkable when you learn that Estabrooks produced these pieces for a Friends of AIDS calendar.

Estabrooks's fascination with maps as elements of collage is obvious in several of her recent paintings, including Winning Spirit and California Cat. She takes the use of maps to the extreme with her Connecticut Tulip, in which she not only creates the flower with torn state maps, but decoupages the entire frame with map segments as well. Having thus used up her atlas, Estabrooks "grabbed a music book" and created A Tulip Sings by tearing sheets of music to produce the singular floral image.

While it is easy to be captivated by the bright figures and fanciful situations, it is Estabrooks's masterful use of her medium that pulls everything together. Long, flashing brush strokes in her acrylics and mixed-media works provide richly toned backgrounds for skittering lines and over-painted areas, often highlighted with shimmering glitter. The smaller oil pastels are rife with texture and depth in a profusion of rainbow colors. The readily apparent ease with which Estabrooks gathers her disparate elements onto each page provides the catalyst for the emotional kick we get from her spirited efforts.

The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Call 854-4202.