Suzanne Muchnic wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "What's interesting about this art is that Estes pulls warm textures from slick materials and builds soft forms from hard-edge patterns…her real concerns are light, space and color transformation achieved by repetition and a rigid system.
In 2005, Fisher Galleries at the University of Southern California (U. S. C.) organized Contemporary Soliloquies on the Natural World: Karen Carson, Merion Estes, Constance Mallinson, Margaret Nielsen, Takako Yamaguchi.
Los Angeles Times art critic David Pagel wrote that Estes' paintings were a "dizzying collision of extravagantly patterned fabrics onto which the artist has splashed, sprayed and stained various mixtures of oil and acrylic."
Michael Duncan wrote in Art in America, "Estes is one of L.A.'s most underrated, yet most inventive artists who has deeply explored the intersection of nature and decoration in brash, vigorously constructed, brightly colored oil and acrylic paintings.
Curator and writer Constance Mallinson writes, "Through her multiple references to natural life from the sea to the air, Estes evokes a sublime sense of endangered and fragile beauty that extends globally.