'Separate shows' conjoined in truths

From a mysterious past, Anne Siems' ''Girl With Fawn'' emerges.

Having exhibitions by two very different sorts of artists "helps educate patrons," said David Lusk, owner of David Lusk Gallery in Laurelwood. "They generally like it. The space is big, and they can always turn a corner and see something else."

There will be a reception tonight, from 6 to 8, for the exhibitions "From Peace Mountain," by local artist Don Estes, and "Connected," by Anne Siems from Seattle. Estes creates large abstract paintings with powerful horizontal motifs that suggest landscape material. Siems -- pronounced "seems" -- paints intensely detailed portraits of women and girls wearing Restoration-era clothes in dark, mysterious forest-like settings.

Don Estes' ''While You Slept on the Way Home'' rides a memory.

From a mysterious past, Anne Siems' ''Girl With Fawn'' emerges.

"The juxtaposition is not necessarily deliberate," said Lusk, "but it may be fruitful."

Estes has been working on this series of paintings since 2002, beginning with a group inspired by a view of the Mississippi River and the Arkansas flatlands seen from across the bluffs.

"Those were mainly black and white," said the artist, "with very horizontal lines and all of the lines of equal weight." The series continued with epic-size paintings that barely expanded the color scheme from black and white to beige and tan and ochre with black striations. About two years ago, color began to creep into the paintings, to the point that several pieces in this show are almost saturated with brilliant hues, though still contained within horizontal factors.

"The past couple of years show an evolution," said Estes. "There's a property I go to in Arkansas, and you could say that's behind the layered and collaged lines. They all start in black and white, and then I start introducing washes and higher-key color. There's a lot involved. I'm kind of surprised myself."

Estes doesn't mind if his abstract paintings evoke a sense of landscape.

"There are hints and intimations of landscape," he said, "though I think it's more of a sense of place rather than a specific landscape. They're produced more from a hodge-podge of memory than from anything photographic."

Estes, who puts his age at "mid-50s," said that he considered his and Siems' exhibitions as "separate shows."

Siems, in a telephone interview from her home in Seattle, agreed, "but that doesn't mean that it's not an interesting conjunction. I don't get involved with the display of the work, but the gallery is so elegant and impressive, and we have two different but strong artists, so there doesn't necessarily have to be a theme. I mean, considering my work, I'd like to show in maybe an old palace."

That would be an appropriate environment.

Siems' paintings seem to open windows onto sublimated fairy tales and psychological scenarios first staked out in childhood and translated into the pastures and forests of 17th century England. Meticulously rendered dresses of the period are, in the current work, lacily transparent, lending her scrupulously unsmiling figures a ghost-like appearance.

"I wasn't raised with folklore or fairy tales," said Siems, 44, who is from Berlin and moved to the United States in 1991, "though of course there is a great heritage of fairy tales and folk lore in Germany. Really it just works itself out in the paintings. I like the sense of something overshadowing, not just something pretty for itself.

"Landscapes or still-life painting by themselves don't concern me. I want to see something a little 'off,' a little idiosyncratic. I want the paintings to look like those peculiar objects you find in the back of antique stores."

Perhaps it's not too much of a stretch to link Siems' later remark that she "is esthetically drawn to the mysterious and the romantic" with Estes' comment about "hints and intimations" of landscape in his work. Obviously, neither is interested in "just something pretty."

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'Connected' by Anne Siems; 'From Peace Mountain' by Don Estes

Opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. tonight at David Lusk Gallery, 4540 Poplar Ave. The exhibits run through Nov. 25. For more information, call 767-3800 or go to davidluskgallery.com.

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