Riding in Tandem

Her husband, Ross, calls her Mosquito because that’s what she looks like to him — all awkward elbows and determination — when he is riding behind her on bicycle trips here in Marin County, Calif., or, farther afield, on more ambitious tours through the hills of Idaho or Italy.

Nancy Goldstein likes cycling well enough, but with him and their two grown sons so crazy for the sport, and now all racing competitively, what choice does she have, really? She knows the lingo, keeps up with the American circuit and is resigned to having nine bicycles dangling from the garage of her sleek new house in Mill Valley, Calif.

Without the associated pull of spokes and oil painting reproduction, there is no doubt she would have spent more of her time in out-of-the-way galleries searching for emerging artists whose work moves her, art collecting being her No. 1 sport.

Occasionally, as happened one day in the walled Tuscan town of San Gimignano, her worlds collide. “We were on this really cool back-roads trip and had just made it to the top of a peak,” said Ms. Goldstein, 56. “We had all of 15 minutes to rest or eat when I spotted a gallery. Inside, I found this incredible oil painting of a bicycle coming out of the box by the Italian artist Marica Fasoli.”

She whipped out her credit card, and the painting almost beat them back to California. It is now prominently displayed in the home office where Mr. Goldstein, 66, a psychologist and author, spends much of his time writing fiction. His most recent book, “Chain Reaction,” is a romantic tale about (what else?) the world of competitive cycling, published in 2011. (The movie rights have been secured, and he sees George Clooney as the perfect choice for the hard-driving father of the young lead character, based not so loosely on himself.)

The bike theme runs so deep through their lives that when asked about her own role in the family, Ms. Goldstein, who worked in real estate before her sons were born, answered with a cycling term. “You could say I’m a domestique,” she said, deploying a clever and apropos double entendre. In cycling, a domestique is a supporting rider who tamps all personal ambition to do whatever is required for the success of the team.

Ms. Goldstein’s star turn came a couple of years ago when she found a lovely half acre of land on the outskirts of town for roughly $1 million. For a decade she had been envisioning their empty nest as an urban loft, an industrial backdrop for her growing art collection. She went about building a team, hiring Aidlin Darling Design as the architect and Susan Collins Weir for interior design.

The design they came up with centers on an open living area that flows directly into a courtyard with a solar-powered lap pool, making the 4,000-square-foot house seem even larger. On either side are the sleeping quarters: the master bedroom on one side and bedrooms for Chase, a law student in New York, and Graham, an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, on the other.

New York City composer David Crowell’s original music score accompanies the visual display of Rebecca Crowell’s paintings paired with artifacts from the Pratt collection. This is an unusual multi-senses presentation for the Museum.

Since 2002 Crowell has been working with cold wax medium and oil, according to her website, after earning her MFA in painting from Arizona State University in 1985, she has led a life “focused on painting.”
Crowell has worked almost daily in her studio in western Wisconsin taking time out only for travels and painting in England, Spain, the Western United States and the Canary Island of Lanzarote.

In the fall of 2011, she was an artist in residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annamaghkerrig in Ireland. Crowell is represented in fine art galleries in New Mexico, Colorado, Toronto and Wisconsin. She has recently signed with an agent to represent her in Ireland and the UK and was featured in an exhibit in Dublin, Ireland in October of 2011.

She uses a kind of “memory mapping” to create her works which, although visually quite abstract, often still retain faint echoes of landscape and nature;  its plant life, earth and rocks. For Crowell rugged textures, earthy colors and a feeling of light, open spaces reveals her subliminal interest in the colors, mark-making and abstraction of at least a “memory” of landscape.

Although her work is generally quiet, orderly and meditative in its finished form, her process of working in multiple layers, cutting, scratching and digging back can be quite violent. She couples sharp tools and aggressive “archaeology” with periods of careful editing and decisiveness. She considers the place of any fortunate accidents and random occurrences.

A commentator on Crowell’s website says, “Crowell is an artist of considerable talent and stature and it is not difficult to envisage a major breakthrough into the mainstream of the American art scene in the very near future. Recent international representation would indicate that her future reputation will not just be limited to America.”

Crowell’s work is displayed in galleries around the country and abroad. In conjunction with her show, Crowell will give an Oil and Wax Painting Workshop at Kachemak Bay Campus, this weekend, Aug. 9-11.
“The workshop is very popular and it’s full already,”  Kachemak Bay Campus University Director Carol Swartz said. Participants will explore methods of building up abstract paintings in layers, using cold wax medium, tube paint, powdered pigments and other media.

Read the full products at http://artsunlight.com/.