Abstract painter Rebecca Crowell is based outside of Osseo, using natural landscape (both local and foreign) as inspiration for her artwork, which can be found in galleries throughout the United States and Europe.

Outside Osseo, in a studio folded into the green hills like a hidden hue in one of her paintings, Rebecca Crowell creates eloquent abstract work from the landscape around her. She came to Eau Claire in the early 1980s as an undergraduate studying painting at UW-Eau Claire and now, decades later, her work is represented by galleries in the United States and Europe, and she teaches workshops on painting technique which are in high demand both within the States and internationally. Over the course of her long professional career her methods of working have evolved and the scope of the landscape she works from has increased from her Wisconsin backyard to the terrain of foreign countries.

Though she travels extensively to exhibit and teach, Crowell still maintains a local presence. Earlier this year the L.E. Phillips Library in downtown Eau Claire put on Crowell’s solo show “Gift of Days” – a group of oil and mixed media abstract landscapes inspired by the North Atlantic coast of Ireland. She was  very pleased to do the show, in part out of pleasant nostalgia: It was an ArtsWest juried exhibition at the same library years ago that led to her first real professional breakthrough. At that exhibition her work was awarded Best in Show and the juror offered representation at her gallery in St. Paul. “At a time when I was really discouraged and it just wasn’t going anywhere,” Crowell remembers, “that was a huge turnaround.”

“One of the nicest things people say to me, and I hear this pretty often, is ‘I don’t like abstraction but I like your work,’ ” Crowell said. “People see the work that goes into it and that it’s evocative of the things in their lives. I like to be a bit of an ambassador for abstraction."

Crowell and her husband Don Ticknor (of local disc golfing fame) landed in western Wisconsin looking for a quiet country place to settle down and bought a small house on 40 acres where they still live. It is a measure of their serious dedication to her work that before improving their house, they built a studio. Sitting in her well-used studio today, Crowell laughs with gratitude about how it was her husband who first stated the obvious fact that she needed that space as their family grew to fill the house.

“He’s always been supportive. At the time, the house up there was maybe half the size, but it was a very tiny, little, rough house that we put up with for a long time,” Crowell said. “It was just kind of funny to build this studio that was pretty much nicer than the house.”

The studio is a utilitarian building tucked behind the house and down the hill, one large room with a concrete floor, tabletops arrayed with the interestingly encrusted tools of her trade, all furniture arranged to focus on the large brightly lit white wall where Crowell makes her work.

Having most recently returned from a spring artist residency in Sweden, Crowell’s work on the studio wall the day I visited was primarily based on the birch forests of Lappland, one 40” x 40” finished piece, a mixed media on panel titled “Travels in Lappland #1,” and some smaller panels in progress. The forest imagined in these pieces is a luminous shudder, delicate lines leading both everywhere and nowhere. The trees seem at the same time both inches and miles from your eyes.

“When I first come back from a place it’s pretty specific about that place,” she said. “Like those two on the end are about Sweden. They’re about birch bark and snow and things like that. Then as time goes by it might start integrating with something else or I might just pull certain abstract elements out of it and use them in some other way. So it gets its roots in those places and then it spreads out.”

On these pieces Crowell uses oil paints mixed with cold wax medium, allowing her to both build a thick surface forward and to scrape back layers to reveal hidden colors as she works to feel out the connections between the outer landscape of the living Earth and the inner landscape of a living being.

Without a set plan and working from memory, she follows along the marks, building the layers, the tangled map, lines of one tree upon another, one scar upon another, wind, rocks, lichens, the fire, revealing the final abstracted structure by trusting a life of practice to lead her to it.

“One of the nicest things people say to me, and I hear this pretty often, is ‘I don’t like abstraction but I like your work,’ ” Crowell said. “People see the work that goes into it and that it’s evocative of the things in their lives. I like to be a bit of an ambassador for abstraction. To say, ‘Hey,  you can enjoy this, it’s OK! It’s about nature, it’s just a different way of looking at it.’ ”

And it is worth taking the time to look. To see her work is to see the rich fields of the world through an alert mind and a disciplined hand – an artist in full command of her voice. To learn more, visit www.rebeccacrowell.com.