David Estey’s “Blue Figurescape” is one of the newest pieces included in “Driven to Abstraction,” an exhibition of 22 of the artist’s drawings and paintings at the University of Maine at Presque Isle’s Reed Fine Art Gallery. The show runs through April 18.

David Estey has had a wealth of artistic experiences, from painting the welcome signs outside his hometown of Fort Fairfield to a solo exhibition at the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md.

It’s no surprise, considering the wealth of life experiences Estey has had, from traveling across Europe and northern Africa to working for the Internal Revenue Service.

Now that Estey is back in his native Maine — he and his second wife, Karen, who is also a Fort Fairfield native, have a home and studio in Belfast — the primarily abstract painter is letting those experiences inform his art.

Estey makes his return to northern Maine this month with the show “Driven to Abstraction” in the University of Maine at Presque Isle’s Reed Fine Art Gallery.

“I like a lot of different things — a lot of different kinds of art, music — and I have had a lot of different experiences,” Estey said by phone from Belfast. “I suppose that leads me to consider different things when I’m working. I stay with a body of work for a while and then move on to something else, then maybe go back to what I was working on before.”

Estey took many routes on his drive toward abstraction, and that progression is documented in the exhibition of 22 drawings and paintings in oil, graphite and mixed media.

The route that Reed Gallery director Sandra Huck took to find Estey was also quite complicated. Although Estey had been in contact with UMPI art professor Andy Giles, Huck said she first saw Estey’s work in person while visiting the Waterfall Arts gallery in Belfast with a friend. After a phone call, Huck and her friend were in Estey’s studio, where she saw more of his paintings that day.

Huck’s first idea was to put up a display of Estey’s black-and-white figurative drawings. Then, when Huck paid a return visit to Estey in the fall and saw his color work, she thought, why not include both paintings and drawings.

“He’s just so very gracious and he’s had such an interesting life that I thought, this is going to be a very good exhibition,” Huck said. “I wanted to highlight a lot of his work because I think he is very talented and his work is very good. I wanted to show the students here, it’s about how much diversity can I give them, how much can I expose to them?”

Estey himself was exposed to a lot over the years.

He traces his artistic roots back to encouragement from elementary school teachers as he started out researching and drawing animals and nature. He moved on to Mad magazine-style comics of world events, then found dinosaurs, movie and music stars, and historical figures — the exhibition includes an image of Abraham Lincoln Estey painted with household enamels when he was about 16 years old — and his lifelong interest in drawing shows up in his work to this day.

He designed his own model cars, started painting designs on leather jackets for money, and while in school was asked to paint the welcome signs outside Fort Fairfield.

When he was still in high school, Estey moved to Belfast where he continued to draw and paint. He was offered a scholarship, Estey said, to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, where he discovered Abstract Expressionism icon Willem de Kooning and found a mentor in RISD painting instructor Robert Hamilton, who painted in Port Clyde.

During his senior year he traveled to Europe and Morocco, returned home in 1964 and was immediately drafted into the Army. He ended up at Fort Meade in Maryland, site of the super-secret National Security Agency, where Estey held a solo exhibition.

“Somebody found out I was a graduate of RISD and I was looking for something to do in the evenings,” Estey said. “There was an art club at the NSA, believe it or not, and they wanted somebody to teach their kids. I think after a year or two, they asked me if I would like to have an exhibit of my work in the lobby, which was a big open lobby and a balcony with a lot of wall space. I had a one-man show there. I don’t know how many people have done that.”

He later moved on to the IRS where he was a public affairs officer in the Baltimore office in the mid-1970s — a time when the IRS was busy with investigations into President Richard Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew, Maryland Gov. Marvin Mandel, the Roman Catholic Church and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church.

Estey later moved to the Philadelphia office of the IRS, from which he eventually retired. Shortly thereafter, Estey had a solo exhibition called “Inside the IRS.”

After a move to Charlotte, N.C., Estey returned to Maine in 2002 with his wife, Karen. They settled in Belfast, and Estey is now affiliated with Waterfall Arts.

His most recent work is abstract but Estey takes up any style he feels at the time and often picks up drawings and pieces of work he had set aside earlier.

That process occurred in one of the newest pieces in the UMPI exhibition, a painting he calls “Blue Figurescape.” In it, three figures are suspended in a bright blue sky over a landscape. The landscape is space but is clearly a landscape. The figures, however, are totally abstract. There’s something that looks like an ear here, or a nose there, or eyes elsewhere. There is a fleshiness in some places. In others, the figures look like bone.

“It goes back to the use of some of my drawings,” he said. “It’s not exactly what I’m doing at this moment, but it’s going back and doing something with those drawings.”

It’s a process that Suzette McAvoy, former chief curator of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, highlighted in “David Estey: Free Fall,” a foreward she wrote for a recently published book about Estey’s work.

If something intrigues Estey, he said in the recent phone call, he does it, no matter what style it might fit. And he’s got the experience to do it.

“I usually have a bunch of different things going but when one thing informs another project, I use what I learn from that,” he said. “I like to have a lot of stuff around and I like to find solutions rather than getting stuck and stopping.”

“Driven to Abstraction” will be on view until April 18. The Reed Fine Art Gallery is open 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Saturday and is closed Sundays and during university holidays. For more information, go to www.davidestey.com.

jbloch@bangordailynews.net

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